Vernon silver the lost chalice the epic hun ece (v5 0)

So it was no surprise on that rainy evening of June 19, 1990,that nearly every dealer, collector, or curator concerned with art of the ancient world was crammedinto the showroom on Manha

The Lost Chalice

The Epic Hunt for a Priceless Masterpiece

Vernon Silver

To Nikie, for everything

Prologue The Anonymous Bidder

One Burying Sarpedon

Two The Tomb

Three The “Hot Pot”

Four Sarpedon’s Lost Twin

Five Hollywood and Dallas

Six Reversals of Fortune

Seven Auction of the Century

Eight Shattered

Nine Accused

Ten A Trip to Oxford

Eleven Let’s Make a Deal

Twelve Object X

Thirteen The Last Tombarolo

Epilogue The Chalice

AcknowledgmentsCast of CharactersNotes

BibliographySearchable TermsAbout the AuthorCredits

CopyrightAbout the Publisher

The Anonymous Bidder

Even before the Sotheby’s auctioneer started taking bids, Lot 6 was guaranteed to make history.Nothing of its kind—a twenty-five-hundred-year-old pot by the Greek artist Euphronios—had beensold to the public in more than a century And this specimen was exceptional: not only was the dainty,earthen grail the earliest recorded work by a craftsman renowned as the Leonardo da Vinci of vases,but it was among the oldest known, signed artworks in history And the cup’s larger match was

already the world’s most famous bowl, the Euphronios krater, a centerpiece of the MetropolitanMuseum of Art’s collection

Everyone agreed that Sotheby’s was about to sell the rarest type of pot on the planet Scholarsknew of just eight other vases painted and signed by Euphronios, and just five of those were evenclose to being intact This one made six So it was no surprise on that rainy evening of June 19, 1990,that nearly every dealer, collector, or curator concerned with art of the ancient world was crammedinto the showroom on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to learn what was going to happen to the

Euphronios wine cup, known by its Greek name, kylix, or chalice.

After being lost for two millennia, the kylix had appeared without any records in the hands of aHollywood producer who then sold it in 1979 to a Texas billionaire The oilman, Bunker Hunt, hadgone bankrupt and was selling his treasures to pay taxes But mystery surrounded the cup Nobodyknew where it had come from An old, secretive collection? A newly looted tomb? Hunt’s

Hollywood supplier had never revealed the vase’s origin

As the potential buyers shuffled into Sotheby’s from York Avenue, some Euphronios fans joinedthem in the auction hall just to catch a glimpse of the black-and-ocher-hued cup, painted with figures

of Trojan War soldiers and deities Others, including mutual-fund magnate Leon Levy, hoped theywould be lucky or rich enough to actually take the kylix home Reporters from the international press,

from the New York Times to the Economist, readied their notebooks for a record-breaking sale.

Sotheby’s executives prepared to mark a milestone: the first work signed by any ancient artist ever to

be sold by the auction house Among the museum curators, it was probably Dietrich von Bothmer, theMet’s chief of Greek and Roman art, who most coveted the cup as his prize: if the Met won the

bidding, he’d reunite the kylix with its bigger twin, the Euphronios krater, which sat spotlighted underglass in the Met’s ground-floor galleries

The similarities between the museum’s celebrated krater and the four-inch-high chalice were sostriking that the auction drew the attention of another interested party: the Italian police

The pots had surfaced at the same time, in the early 1970s, after decades without a single

discovery of a new Euphronios And both masterpieces depicted the identical scene: the death ofZeus’s son Sarpedon, who is carried Christ-like and bleeding from the battlefield, looking very muchlike another, more famous, son of God All signs pointed to tomb robbers as the source of the kylix

and krater, though Bunker Hunt’s dealer claimed to have legal title, and the Met’s supplier had

produced paperwork tracing the pot to an old Lebanese collection The odds were impossible thatboth the wine cup and the pot for mixing wine and water would emerge simultaneously from old,

private collections The Italians even had testimony from an admitted tomb robber—or tombarolo—

who claimed he’d been part of the team that spent a week clearing out a treasure trove that included apot shard with the image of a bleeding warrior But his memory was too hazy for the police to make acase For the moment So the auction proceeded

Around 7:00 P.M., the crowd filled the seats American dealer Robert Hecht, dressed in a suitand tie, took a chair on the aisle Hecht, an heir to the eponymous Baltimore department store chain,had a personal interest in Euphronios; he had sold the Met its krater for $1 million in 1972 Londondealer Robin Symes, one of Hecht’s greatest rivals in supplying artifacts to museums and rich

collectors, sat on the left side of the hall, away from his competition Symes was a lanky Brit whofavored tuxedos and ran a London gallery with his partner, the son of a Greek shipping tycoon He’dall but dethroned Hecht as the king of top-end antiquities dealing, having wooed away Hecht’s biggestclients and his best underworld sources for artifacts

Despite their rivalry, Hecht and Symes shared a secret They each knew the identity of a man in

a green Lacoste sweater who would become the auction’s anonymous star that day Tanned and

balding, sitting a few rows behind Hecht, the man in the Lacoste wasn’t a familiar face in New

York’s art circles, and he liked keeping it that way

With Sotheby’s chairman and chief auctioneer for North America, John L Marion, brandishingthe hammer, bidding got under way Greek vases were to take up the first half of the sale, followed byGreek, Roman, and Etruscan bronze statues The first lot, a Corinthian pot dating to 600 B.C., stirredlittle enthusiasm, failing to make the top of its estimated price range by selling for just $40,700 Thenext vase did better, topping estimates, but the room hadn’t yet built up the buzz worthy of what was

to come Then the man in the green Lacoste entered the fray On Lot 3, he picked up an Athenian winecup painted with a bust of the god Dionysus for $82,500, shy of the high estimate of $90,000 Thiswas just his warm-up for Lot 6

Sotheby’s expected the Euphronios cup depicting Sarpedon’s death to go for somewhere

between $300,000 and $400,000, a bargain only made possible by a looming recession in 1990 thatpushed the art market into a slump As bidding began, the man in the Lacoste launched a bidding waragainst one of the few people in the room who recognized him, Robin Symes But the British dealerwasn’t going to give up easily, for he was doing the bidding of a very important client: the

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met curator, von Bothmer, had had a chance to buy the kylix in 1973 from one of the

museum’s best overseas suppliers, but it slipped through his hands The price had been just $70,000then, but the museum’s director at the time, Thomas Hoving, had believed that any Euphronios

acquisition would have been radioactive, coming so soon after his controversial purchase of the

matching, million-dollar krater Capturing the krater had been the pinnacle of von Bothmer’s career,but archaeologists and the Italian police said the vase was the product of an illicit dig north of Rome;Hoving turned down von Bothmer’s request to buy the Sarpedon cup

Seventeen years later, the controversy had passed (or so it seemed), and the German-born,

Oxford-educated curator had a second chance If von Bothmer won, the chalice would end up onpublic display with its bigger twin at the Met He could rescue the cup from obscurity This was hischance at redemption

It became clear as the bids mounted that this would be a contest between the Met, fronted by

Symes, and the man in the Lacoste sweater, who took the early lead The casually dressed bidder had

no intention of losing, for reasons only one other person in the room could fully grasp Was he

determined to invest in a masterpiece during a slump in the art market? Or was he driven by someother personal affinity for the kylix—a connection that went back much further in history?

First the two bidders doubled the low estimate, and then they approached three-quarters of amillion dollars, an unheard-of sum at the time for a tiny, clay cup As Symes reached his client’s pricelimit, it became clear that the kylix would not journey across town to the Met and be reunited with thekrater The man in the Lacoste kept raising his paddle, and at $742,500, he captured his prize Andthen, as other lots came up, he kept buying By the end of the evening, he’d scooped up not just theEuphronios kylix, but a handful of ancient vases In one day, he became the owner of one of the finestcollections of Greek pots to be found outside a museum—and had spent just $1.29 million

In the following days, the Met’s von Bothmer would use back channels to try to wrangle thekylix for the Fifth Avenue temple to the arts He relayed an offer to the man in the Lacoste sweater,promising him an instant profit But the anonymous new owner sent back his apologies to the Met Thechalice was not for sale Von Bothmer was crushed, and he would be haunted for the rest of his

career by the one that got away

“You do not regret pieces you acquire, but only those you do not acquire,” he said years later

A few months after the auction, curators at the Louvre in Paris, which has one of the six rare potsEuphronios signed as painter, tried to convince the kylix’s new owner to loan the piece for a

temporary exhibit in September 1990 Again, the man in the Lacoste said no

The kylix was slipping away from public view Reporters who asked Sotheby’s the identity ofthe winning bidder had no luck In the auction house’s after-sale report, Sotheby’s listed the buyeronly as “European Dealer,” a smokescreen that would obscure the cup’s path and frustrate scholars,police, and prosecutors who tried to track the masterpiece

Some twenty-five hundred years earlier, Euphronios had used fine lines and vivid colors toshow the death of a hero who couldn’t be saved by his father, the greatest god on Olympus Now, asquickly and mysteriously as the chalice had surfaced, an anonymous dealer in green golf gear wasdragging it back into hiding

The tale of how a humble wine cup arrived at Sotheby’s that day, and the quest to find where it’sbeen since is the story of the whole modern antiquities trade writ small: it shines light on the dealings

of tomb robbers, smugglers, wealthy collectors, ambitious archaeologists, and corrupt curators It’salso a stunning tale of how the world’s most powerful and prestigious institutions—from the

Metropolitan Museum of Art to Oxford University to Sotheby’s—have knowingly enmeshed

themselves in the shadowy trade

But mostly it’s about the epic life of a cup, its famous twin, and the smuggler who set in motiontheir modern journeys

Since June 19, 1990, nobody has seen the chalice in public The Sarpedon cup is the only

Euphronios vase listed with an unknown location by Oxford’s Beazley Archive database, the standardreference for Greek vessels Its whereabouts are an art world mystery

Until now

CHAPTER ONE

Burying Sarpedon

Hidden in the Western world’s greatest epic lies the tragic story of an obscure prince named

Sarpedon His fight to the death is often forgotten amid the star-studded cast of Homer’s Iliad But

seven centuries after the fabled Trojan War, Sarpedon’s blood-drenched demise inspired Euphronios

to create ceramic masterpieces in his Athens workshop One was the krater pot depicting Sarpedonthat would end up in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art The other, a kylix drinking cup

bearing the same decoration, would become the lost chalice

During his career, in the years just before 500 B.C., Euphronios’s works were possessions thatwere prized far from Greece’s shores Like most of his known vases, the Sarpedon cup and its biggermatch made their way across the Mediterranean on ships sailed either by Greeks or their foreigntrading partners, the Etruscans, who inhabited a land called Etruria in what is today modern Italy.Comparatively little is known about the Etruscans, a civilization predating the Romans Their remainshave been found in the part of Italy now know as Tuscany, and in Rome’s northern suburbs The word

Tuscany even comes from “Etruscan.”

The Etruscans imported so many Greek vases—and buried so many of them in their tombs—thatarchaeologists once mistakenly believed these pots had been made in Italy Of all the known works byEuphronios with documented archaeological origins, only one turned up in Athens All the otherswere dug up in Etruria And of those, most came from sites in the city of Caere, which today is anItalian town called Cerveteri The wealthier, social-climbing Etruscans in Caere built collections,snapping up imported vases by Euphronios and his Athenian competitors When these Etruscan

connoisseurs died, they and their collections of goblets and statues were buried in stone tombs

modeled after the layouts of their homes

In tracing the exact path of Euphronios’s greatest works, the trail largely goes cold in the

necropolis of ancient Cerveteri Over the past century, tomb robbers have destroyed almost all

evidence of the pots’ ancient life stories—and by extension, our ability to decipher the history of theEtruscans

But not all is lost We do know that sometime around 400 B.C., the Etruscans who had been luckyenough to own Euphronios’s Sarpedon krater and kylix buried them in the soil of Caere Although theEtruscans who bought the chalice and krater may remain an enigma, we know the journey of the twinpots starts at a burial ground of stone tombs north of Rome, where the Etruscans sealed their treasuresbehind simple sepulcher doors The Sarpedon chalice and its bigger twin sat in darkness for twenty-four hundred years

Young Dietrich von Bothmer was twelve years old when he saw his first Euphronios vase, a krater

pot for mixing wine, painted with a scene of nude athletes at a gymnasium What von Bothmer sawduring that visit to the Berlin Antikensammlung museum, probably in 1931, was a tableau of youngmen getting dressed and undressed amid equally naked servant boys On one side of the two-handledkeg, on which the clay-colored figures glow against a black background, a youth holds a jar out ofwhich he pours oil for rubdowns An athlete plays with his discus while a toga-wearing pal extends

an index finger toward the discus thrower’s penis In all, they seem to be having a fine time at thegym

Von Bothmer decided on the spot to become an archaeologist And the discipline certainly coulduse passionate, new talent to help bridge the gaps in knowledge of the past that centuries of treasurehunting and tomb robbing had left

One example of the challenges facing archaeology sat in front of von Bothmer at the Berlin

museum Little was known at the time about the krater that had captured his imagination; it had beendug up just north of Naples in Capua, an ancient city on the Appian Way, one of the longer roads thatfamously lead to Rome But its earlier origins were a matter of interpretation Even the attribution ofthe vase to Euphronios was an educated guess, as the krater bore no signature

Without signatures or without knowing where such pots were found, museums, collectors, andscholars relied on stylistic comparisons This pot looked like a Euphronios And the man who had thefinal say was at Oxford Sir John Beazley, professor of archaeology and the world’s leading authority

on Greek pots, declared that the krater was a Euphronios And so it was

Confronted with collections and museums packed with pots of unknown origins, Beazley

devised a system for grouping and attributing ancient vases that was based largely on interpretingstyles That remains the standard today With so few vases having signatures, Beazley and his

colleagues had to invent names for the artists The painter of one particularly fine vase, which sitsnear the Euphronios that inspired young von Bothmer, was dubbed the Berlin Painter, after the

German museum Now, following Beazley’s system, any vase that resembles the technique of theoriginal “Berlin Painter” is given the same attribution

Even in his native Germany, Dietrich von Bothmer learned of Beazley’s mastery of Greek pots

It was just a matter of time before von Bothmer followed his youthful fascination all the way to

Beazley’s office In 1938, the promising archaeologist sailed to England and went up to Oxford asone of Germany’s last Rhodes scholars admitted before war erupted

Oxford was, and is, a place as confusing as it is fascinating, a conglomeration of a few dozensemiautonomous colleges and as many academic departments, museums, and labs The nineteen-year-old von Bothmer was lost as soon as he arrived

Oxford’s Wadham College had admitted him as a student for the diploma in classical

archaeology, but when von Bothmer got to Wadham, a fellow of the college said he needed to hikeover to Christ Church, the college where his tutor—the faculty member responsible for preparing himfor his exams—was based Map in hand, young Dietrich, speaking imperfect English, made his way tothe edge of the campus and learned from his alleged tutor at Christ Church that he’d be supervised byProfessor Beazley Beazley, said the Christ Church don, was expecting von Bothmer at the

university’s Ashmolean Museum

Von Bothmer found Beazley in the museum’s library—where the professor was writing out

excerpts from the latest issue of the journal Monumenti Antichi—and began the most important

relationship of his career

Almost every working day, from the start of the Michaelmas term, through the following two

trimesters that composed the academic year, Beazley and von Bothmer slipped into a routine Justbefore 1:00 P.M., Beazley would get up from his chair in the library and ask his student, “Are yougoing back to Wadham?” Von Bothmer was, of course, returning for lunch at his college, which was

in the same direction as Beazley’s house at 100 Holywell Street The student took the extra five

minutes to accompany the world’s top expert in Greek vases all the way to the two-story stone house

at the bottom of the narrow lane

The two would talk freely, and almost no subject was off-limits Beazley would catch and

correct von Bothmer’s mistakes in English, but in a way that made the young man see that he wouldsome day master this foreign tongue On Fridays von Bothmer would return to 100 Holywell for anadded treat, tea at 4:00 P.M Beazley, his wife, and an assortment of guests would gather in the diningroom for snacks, and for an entire hour Beazley would say nothing

Then, at 5:00 P.M sharp, the professor would stand and lead his three or four students into thestudy, where for two hours they pored over photographs and actual fragments of ancient vases, whichthey could handle and turn in their own hands Beazley would ask the students questions and fill in thegaps in their knowledge But it was the physical connection to the decorated pot shards that von

Bothmer would recall as the most rewarding part of his education at Oxford In fact, the mentorship

he built with Beazley would prove to have the biggest payoff For in just one year, he managed toposition himself as Beazley’s eventual successor as the world’s top authority on the authenticity andartistry of Greek vessels

The same year von Bothmer left for Oxford, the man who would some day determine the fate of the

Sarpedon chalice came into the world in Rome On July 6, 1938, Giuseppa Frisoni gave birth to herson, Giacomo, in an apartment on Via della Lupa, a cobblestoned alley where she lived with herhusband, Guido Medici, and their two older children in a building with ancient foundations next to thehulking Palazzo Borghese Guido eked out a living digging up ancient tombs and temples He wasn’t

an archaeologist, and it wasn’t entirely clear if his treasure hunting was legal But harvesting statuesand vases from the lumpy fields north of Rome was a reliable way to feed a growing family

It went without saying that the infant Giacomo Medici would probably go into the family

business What nobody in their crowded walk-up could know is that young Giacomo, the boy with thegreen eyes, would uncover the greatest treasures ever found on Italian soil That he would rise

through the profession to provide ancient loot to the world’s biggest museums and richest privatecollections was beyond their imaginations

These Medici—the Medici of Rome—could never be confused with the noble Medici of

Florence Five centuries earlier, those Medici had financed the Renaissance, produced three popes,and hired Michelangelo and Botticelli as their interior designers Giacomo Medici, on the other hand,had only the name and its contrast with his current station in life, perched above a dark alleyway inRome’s rabbit warren of medieval streets

Men like Giacomo Medici and his father had made a living off antiquities for centuries Duringthe Grand Tour of the 1700s and 1800s, his predecessors guided acquisitive Englishmen on shoppingsprees amid the ruins of ancient civilizations The tourist-explorers hauled off the contents of newlycracked tombs and built collections that furnished stately country homes and London sitting rooms.Little had changed by 1938 Guido’s clients were rich Italian families, and his excavation was oftendone with permits from the government’s cultural authorities He worked the land with a shovel andspillo, the long, steel spear with which antiquities diggers probe the soil in hopes of hearing the

telltale clink from the top of a buried tomb.

A year after young Giacomo’s birth, Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini, pushed through a law thatwould doom the Medici family business His government declared that any artifact found on Italiansoil was the property of the state A similar law had already been on the books since 1909, but the

1939 legislation—based on Mussolini’s brand of militaristic nationalism—made the issue crystalclear Mussolini knew his ancient civilizations, and he fancied himself a modern Caesar

For the Medici family, the antiquities law was an annoyance compared with the real hardshipsthey faced as Mussolini allied with Hitler and drew Italy into war with the British and Americans.Rome became a target for Allied invasion, so by 1940, Guido Medici evacuated his family to thecountryside

The Medici clan ventured twenty-five miles north to Giuseppa’s hometown, Fiano Romano,where they joined Giacomo’s grandparents, Luigi and Luigia Being situated in the middle of ancientEtruscan territory was perfect for Guido’s digging And the kids—Roberto, the eldest; Caterina,

known as Rina; and Giacomo, the youngest—had fields to play in, animals to feed, and doting

grandparents to look after them The hardship and brutality of war were kept at bay a little longer andcrept up slowly

Fiano Romano sits on a hill surrounded by farmland Atop the hill, in the oldest part of the town,

a fifteenth-century duke’s castle lords over the terrain Giacomo Medici’s grandparents lived just ahundred yards from the castle, which German troops had occupied Guido, his wife, and three kidslived nearby, above a shop that pressed olives into olive oil, in a two-bedroom home

At first the war seemed like a spectator sport to the kids After dark, Giacomo and his friendsclimbed onto roofs at the highest points in Fiano Romano to take in the panorama In the distance theycould see bombs falling Allied aircraft dropped flares that turned night into day, illuminating thefields and surrounding hills American B-17 Flying Fortress bombers came over the horizon in V-shaped formations, the four engines of each plane combining to create a low-pitched hum of an

approaching swarm

As the spring of 1944 began, the bombs always dropped on someone else’s city For Giacomo,the fireworks were a diversion Then, on the morning of May 27, 1944, Giacomo learned war wasanything but a game

After breakfast on that Saturday, he was roaming the neighborhood with the independence of aboy his age, two months shy of six His grandmother was at home caring for the newest member of thefamily, her eleven-month-old granddaughter, named Luigia after her Around 10:00 A.M., the air sirenssounded

As he’d done many times before, Giacomo jogged over to the bomb shelter, a wine cellar deepbeneath a neighbor’s house, but opened for communal use in emergencies From inside he could hearthe familiar sound of the low-flying bombers—a droning hum of propellers—followed by the whistle

of dozens of small missiles dropping through the sky A quick series of explosions followed,

boomboomboomboom, as the carpet of ordnance hit the ancient landscape Luckily for Giacomo,

those sounds were distant The bombs had fallen far from the town

After the racket drifted away, the lookouts sounded an all-clear siren The doors to the shelterflung open and Giacomo, tired of being cooped up and just spooked enough to seek the security of hisgrandmother, skipped toward her red-roofed house to see what fun he could find

That’s when the sound came back The Allied aircraft had turned around Nobody had time toraise the alarm before the bombs started to drop Giacomo raced for his grandmother’s home as theFlying Fortresses took aim at the castle at the top of the hill in which the Nazis were ensconced But

the tiny Frisoni house wasn’t far from the target—and the bombers’ aim wasn’t good.

Inside, fifty-eight-year-old Luigia scooped up her infant namesake to shelter the baby from theonslaught Outside, Giacomo made his last dash for the front door One of the bombs scored a directhit on the house

A few blocks away, another bomb smashed into the two-story building where Giacomo livedwith his parents and siblings In the fields below Fiano Romano, the carpet bombing hit a farm about

a mile away where Giacomo’s grandfather, Luigi, was working The explosions killed the sheep andgoats he was tending and left him gravely injured The Medici house was crushed, but it had beenempty and nobody was hurt

The bomb that hit the grandmother’s house took the greatest toll It smashed down, first throughthe clay roof tiles and then through the heavy wooden beams A pile of terra-cotta and timber engulfedthe two Luigias It would take three days to dig out their bodies When they did, they found the babystill wrapped tight in her grandmother’s protective embrace

Giacomo never made it into the house When the bomb exploded, it sent a six-inch slice of hotshrapnel into his skull The last thing he saw was the front door And then everything went black

The war also put Dietrich von Bothmer’s life in grave danger After just a year of studies, Oxford

awarded him a diploma in classical studies Then, as Germany and England prepared for battle, thefighting-age von Bothmer left for the United States, sailing on June 28, 1939, from Southampton to

New York on the Queen Mary His mission was to visit museums on behalf of Beazley, gathering

data that his mentor would include in his definitive catalogs of Athenian red-figure and black-figurevases

America teemed with new and growing museums and rich collectors such as newspaper baronWilliam Randolph Hearst Here was a fresh frontier for finding newly excavated Greek pots that hadcrossed the Atlantic Europe’s collections were already well documented, its collectors too poor andits museum curators mostly concerned with protecting their treasures from wartime bombardment.Von Bothmer had come to the right place at the right time

He spent the next few years trying to solidify his credentials so that Beazley could eventuallypass the torch to him From 1940 to 1942, von Bothmer studied at the University of California at

Berkeley He then spent a year at the University of Chicago before hopping back to Berkeley Sincethe ongoing fighting on the Atlantic prevented him from returning home, and he also had his eye oneventual U.S citizenship, von Bothmer enlisted in the army in San Francisco on October 26, 1943 Afew months later, the University of California awarded him his PhD, and then he shipped out to thePacific for a tour through New Guinea, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines

In 1944, as bombs fell on the countryside around Rome, von Bothmer was fighting the Japanese

in the Pacific, as a private in the Thirty-first Infantry Division of the U.S Army On August 11,

twenty-five-year-old von Bothmer joined a patrol behind enemy lines in Dutch New Guinea, nearSarmi, a town on the north coast of what is today the Papua province of Indonesia The patrol tookfire, and von Bothmer was hit in both legs The other soldier with him was wounded even worse Andthe two of them were stuck five miles inside Japanese territory

Giacomo Medici lay on the ground beside the rubble of his grandparents’ house when the bombs

stopped falling just before 11:00 A.M Blood streamed from the gash in his skull where the shrapnelhad embedded Even worse, blood gushed from the boy’s nose, and pink foam frothed from his ears.

“It’s brain matter, brain matter!” Giacomo’s mother heard a horrified neighbor scream as sherushed to his side “He’s going to die, he’s going to die.” As villagers tried to dig through the rubblethat had buried Giacomo’s grandmother and baby sister, hoping to find survivors, they debated

whether they should even bother seeking help for the boy

As Giacomo’s limbs flinched spasmodically and blood continued to flow from his ears, thecrowed decided to haul the boy down to the pharmacy, the closest thing Fiano Romano had to a

medical clinic Giacomo would probably die at the pharmacy, but at least they would have triedsomething From the pharmacy, his family managed to flag down a U.S Army jeep, whose soldiersagreed to drive the boy thirteen miles south to the hospital in the small city of Monterotondo Whenthey dropped him off, Giacomo was unconscious but still breathing

As the day wore on, it became clear that the nearly six-year-old boy had fallen into a coma Oneday passed, and then another The bleeding stopped, and nurses covered the slice in his head withgauze Finally, a week after Allied forces bombed his house and then helped save his life, Giacomo’ssenses returned On June 4, a few days after Giacomo regained consciousness, Allied troops took theItalian capital But for the boy whose wound wouldn’t heal, the war was far from over

Under the bandages, Giacomo’s head was a pool of pus Antibiotics were scarce After a month,with the gash still open, a man from Fiano Romano came to collect him, driving a wooden cart pulled

by a single horse The paesano loaded him in, hopped up into his seat, grabbed the reins, and headed

north

As they climbed the hill into Fiano Romano, neighbors on the side of the road cheered for theboy

In the Pacific, from five miles behind the Japanese front line, the wounded von Bothmer managed

to carry his fellow GI to safety For his heroics, the U.S Army awarded him the Bronze Star Hemight have won a greater honor, the Silver Star, but that would have required two witnesses and vonBothmer had only one—the man whose life he’d saved The United States did, however, make him acitizen

After he recovered from his wounds in a military hospital, the U.S Army discharged von

Bothmer in March 1946 Armed with a PhD and references from the famous Beazley, von Bothmerheaded east to New York The job hunt was a cinch for the decorated war hero and credentialedclassicist By the next month, he landed a spot at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an assistant inthe Greek and Roman department

He’s been there ever since, for better and, sometimes, worse

Left homeless by the bombing, the Medici family moved to the edge of town into an improvised

shelter crafted from a cave Giacomo, normally a chubby kid, became thin from lack of food At thesame time, the swelling from his injury had the disturbing effect of making his green eyes bulge out ofhis skull

Crime was rampant, and Medici and his family were often victims Giacomo lived in fear ofhaving his bread stolen, or worse, as desperation drove some villagers to violence in the quest for

scarce resources Giacomo’s recovery didn’t go well It would be several years before his eyeballswould shrink back into his head He fell four years behind in his studies, partly due to the

interruptions of war and partly because he hadn’t regained all his mental and physical abilities Whenhis parents reenrolled him in school at age ten, Giacomo could barely function as a student At a timewhen his cohort could write words, his attempts to draw the letters of the alphabet came out as

incoherent scribbles

The hardships made it more important than ever for Giacomo’s father to find steady work

excavating antiquities His best chance came in the late 1940s when he went to work digging for

Prince Vittorio Massimo, the head of Rome’s oldest noble family

The Massimo family traces its roots back twenty-two hundred years—and its properties

contained ruins, tombs, and treasures even older than the ancient dynasty itself Among the projectsthat Prince Massimo hired Guido Medici to excavate was Lucus Feroniae, a shrine surrounded byruins of a Roman amphitheater, baths, basilica, and other buildings Worshippers at this shrine hadmade offerings of statuettes made of stone, clay, and bronze Guido and Prince Massimo set aboutcollecting them

For the curly-haired prince, these were excavations into his own family’s past He was

descended from a general, Fabius Maximus, who’d saved Rome from Hannibal’s advancing army byusing delay tactics that wore out the Carthaginian troops from 217 to 214 B.C Going back even further

in time, the modern prince could trace his lineage into the haze of mythology His ancestor FabiusMaximus was said to be the great-great-grandson of none other than Heracles, the muscular hero ofGreek and Roman myth, also known as Hercules (Heracles, according to the Greek biographer

Plutarch’s The Parallel Lives, had consorted with a nymph next to the Tiber River, and she gave birth

to a boy, Fabius.) But the family tree didn’t stop there Heracles, in turn, was a son of Zeus

That, of course, makes Heracles a half brother of Sarpedon, the Lycian prince whom Euphroniospainted on both the krater and the lost chalice Or to put it another way: the modern prince who hiredGuido Medici to dig up his fields was related to the ancient prince whose death was depicted on avase hidden somewhere in the ground nearby

Giacomo saw some of his first dig sites during his father’s collaboration with the prince in thedecade after the war He inherited his father’s passion for antiquities And the time he spent aroundPrince Massimo showed him what it meant to be rich, to have a grand heritage, and, by extension,how to live up to the Medici name Giacomo surmised from Prince Massimo’s example that

antiquities were a mark of aristocracy An artifact could give a man a material connection to a past hecould call his own

Giacomo was in awe of the prince and his possessions When not at his residence in Rome,Prince Massimo lived in a castle on the edge of Fiano Romano, a real crenellated heap with a towerand a big central courtyard, called Castello di Scorano To Giacomo’s delight, his father often

brought him along on visits to the castle to conduct business When the massive doors of Castello diScorano swung open, what he discovered was something out of Ali Baba’s cave Prince Massimo hadpiled his archaeological finds in the open-air quadrangle Indoor storerooms burst with artifacts bigand small that the prince had stacked to the ceilings

As if that didn’t make a big enough impression, on April 29, 1954, Giacomo got his first taste ofthe international high life Prince Massimo married the British film actress Dawn Addams, who had

starred in B movies such as that year’s science fiction feature Riders to the Stars After a ceremony

in Rome, the couple rode their black sedan up to the castle in Fiano Romano for a buffet reception inthe courtyard Giacomo watched from the sidelines, agog

A bowtied Charlie Chaplin sat at a round table in the garden with his wife, Oona O’Neill,

daughter of the playwright Eugene O’Neill American and Italian actors mingled with a former MissItaly and members of the minor Italian royalty Giacomo, wearing shorts, mingled with the kitchenstaff and ate leftovers

Giacomo was fifteen years old and he was seeing what he wanted in life in a neat package ofcelebrity, riches, and antiquities

Now he’d just have to grab it

Giacomo and his older brother, Roberto, learned more and more about the antiquities trade as their

father got deeper into his work as a digger and, increasingly, as a dealer with his own stall at Rome’soutdoor antiquarian market on Piazza Borghese

One impediment to the family’s progress in the years just after the war was that legally theirprofession was becoming riskier The police started to apply Mussolini’s antiquities law on

occasion, but more often they would look the other way Private landowners could apply to the

cultural authorities for permits to dig on their own land When a landowner found a statue or pot of

significant value and turned it over to the government, he’d be paid a premio, or reward, to

compensate him The landowner would also hold on to some of the stash, even if he wasn’t supposed

to As long as the government got material for its museums, everyone stayed happy

This informal system lacked archaeological rigor and record keeping Beautiful works of artsprung from the ground, but even if they ended up in museums, nobody would ever know exactly

where they’d been found or what other objects or human remains they had been buried alongside

In the decade following the war, the flawed but orderly traditional system of rich men looting offtheir own estates in collaboration with the authorities fell apart Post-Fascist agrarian reforms

chopped up feudal landholdings and handed them over to the people Instead of one rich family

conducting digs in official or unofficial concert with the authorities, thousands of poor families

suddenly owned land from which they needed to make a living by planting and harvesting food Theantiquities beneath their plows were either riches to secretly sell or, if they got the police involved,potential obstacles to their farming livelihoods There was the risk the government would seize theland if the find was important enough The compensation could be paltry

As the antiquities trade began its transition from a nineteenth-century gentleman’s game, and theauthorities started to clamp down, the Medici family managed to squeeze some good out of the

government Giacomo’s shrapnel gash qualified him for state benefits as a war invalid In 1956, thegovernment awarded Giacomo a scholarship that gave him housing and food at a dormitory in

L’Aquila, a town in the neighboring region of Abruzzi He enrolled at the Istituto Tecnico IndustrialeAmedeo di Savoia Duca D’Aosta—a technical school Giacomo was already eighteen years oldwhen he started his high school training as an electrician, a profession he would never take up

In New York, the other men whose lives would intersect with Medici’s were also carving out

careers On July 2, 1959, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it was promoting von Bothmer

to curator of Greek and Roman art At the bottom of the announcement, which included several other

promotions and was carried in the New York Times, was this news: “Also added to the Cloisters’

staff is Thomas P F Hoving, curatorial assistant.”

Hoving was twenty-eight years old at the time and had already had his share of adventures Arich kid whose father was chairman and controlling shareholder of the legendary jewelers Tiffany &Co., he had been kicked out of two prep schools before coasting into Princeton By his own account,after drinking too much and nearly flunking out there, too, he stumbled upon a class on medieval artand found his passion He excelled, graduated, and after a stint in the Marine Corps, returned to

Princeton for graduate school in art history and archaeology

As part of his studies, Hoving excavated in Sicily and studied in Rome, where he first met theAmerican antiquities scholar and art dealer Robert Hecht in 1956 Hoving had just earned his PhDfrom Princeton when his Manhattan social connections got him his job on the bottom rung at the Met

in 1959

For Hoving, Hecht, and von Bothmer, those formative years would be the beginning of the

greatest, and possibly most traumatic, adventure of their careers

During Giacomo’s summer vacations from technical school, he helped his father selling artifacts at

Piazza Borghese He was now selling antiquities in the center of Rome, making connections, meetingrich collectors, and learning the market for the artifacts he already knew so well The business didwell enough that Guido Medici, now a father of six, moved the family back to Rome in 1960 Thefollowing year, Giacomo passed his exams and graduated, at age twenty-two, from the technical

school with an electrician’s diploma

But before he could start working in the family business, Medici had to perform his mandatorymilitary service For most of his year and a half in the Italian army, Medici was based at Bracciano,near Cerveteri, the heart of Etruscan tomb territory In fact, after his officers learned of Medici’sbackground in excavation, they put him to work identifying spots for the soldiers to unearth tombswithin the vast grounds of the base

In all, he helped his squad find two or three tombs But they turned out to be just the burial sites

of poorer Etruscans and yielded little more than common buccheri, little black Etruscan pots These

discoveries may not have been much, but they satisfied Medici’s officers enough that they gave himpermits to leave the base and allowed him to keep his car near the barracks—and keep up his sociallife In 1962, he met a girl named Maria Luisa Renzi at a friend’s party in Monterotondo, the samecity where the U.S troops had taken him after the bombing Maria Luisa was from Civitavecchia, aport city on the Etruscan coast north of Rome Her parents owned shops, including tobacco and

stationery stores He was smitten at the sight of her “simple looks and sunny face,” by which he meantshe was the marrying type

While Giacomo Medici’s mind was on romance, the police started paying attention to what wasgoing on at his father’s stall The elder Medici had sold an Etruscan vase to a law professor of theUniversity of Perugia; when the police later asked the professor where he’d gotten his pot, the lawexpert fingered his source The Guardia di Finanza—the finance police—paid a visit to Piazza

Borghese in the autumn of 1963 while Giacomo was on duty When Giacomo and his father failed toprovide the Finanza with a legitimate source for some of the clay vessels, prosecutors charged themen with receiving looted antiquities They went on trial, a process that in Italy can last years due tothe sporadic court dates and judges’ overbooked schedules

As the trial hung over them, Giacomo pulled himself away from his work with his father, andinstead tried to build his own business While his older brother, Roberto, set up his own businessselling antique furniture at the Porta Portese bazaar on the other side of the Tiber River, Giacomo

stuck to ancient art The antiquities market was more liquid and the goods were more portable thanwardrobes and sideboards.

Through his own work and his father’s connections, Giacomo got to know the network of buyerswho would pull the young man from subsistence into affluence He earned enough that on May 22,

1966, he could marry Maria Luisa at the Church of San Giuseppe in Santa Marinella, a seaside town

in the heart of Medici’s Etruscan stomping grounds north of Rome The following day the newlywedsdrove off in Giacomo’s Ford for a two-week honeymoon in Venice and the French Riviera

Upon his return to Rome, business was so good he became part of the art establishment, helpingseveral wealthy Romans build antiquities collections and getting to know government curators andarchaeologists The biggest fish among Medici’s clients was a pharmaceutical industrialist namedAngelo Pesciotti Pesciotti was free to build his collection because he had an understanding with theculture officials that he would eventually cede his trove to the government’s Villa Giulia Etruscanmuseum in Rome, which was overseen by Mario Moretti, the government superintendent for all theEtruscan land around Rome When Pesciotti died on September 13, 1966, his estate began negotiatingthe sale of most of the collection to the Italian government As Pesciotti planned, the bulk of it ended

up in Villa Giulia, which today has an entire gallery named for him The man who actually gatheredthe artifacts, Giacomo Medici, never won such an honor

antiquities-dealing gambler with a legendary temper—quickly figured out how to use his education tomake money With Rome as a base, he began gathering artifacts from across the Mediterranean andselling them to museums and collectors in Europe and the United States.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, Hecht had been practically alone at the top of the antiquities

market, supplying hundreds of vases and coins to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, dozens of treasures

to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including a solid gold Greek cup, and a pot by Euphronios andpieces of an Etruscan chariot to museums in Germany and Denmark His fluent Italian, French, andGerman—not to mention a smattering of Modern Greek he’d picked up in his classical studies—allowed him to cut deals with merchants and collectors across Europe Hecht and his American wife,Elizabeth, and their two daughters lived in an apartment on Rome’s Aventine Hill Hecht enjoyed theexpat life, playing tennis in Spain during the summer, skiing in the Alps in the winter, and partaking ofabundant, inexpensive wine year-round But he also enjoyed making money, and he knew that Italy’ssoil would be a source of valuable antiquities for years to come

Medici was just twenty-eight years old when he first met Hecht in the spring of 1967 Hecht wasforty-seven and had a lot to teach the young dealer

Hecht was traveling outside Italy when his wife called him to say that an antiquities middleman

he knew had phoned to offer a good kylix wine cup that had just surfaced His message also said thatHecht should be prepared to pay up Hecht made a hasty return to Rome and arranged to meet thedealer on a street near the Capitoline Hill’s Campidoglio, the hilltop plaza designed by

Michelangelo, where city hall overlooks the ruins of the Roman Forum Keenly aware that they

shouldn’t be seen together, the middleman quickly sketched a pencil drawing of each side of the vase.The decoration of the kylix’s tondo—or round painting that covered the cup’s outer surface—was aforest of olive branches An inscription indicated it was probably by the painter Skythes, who was,along with Euphronios, a pioneer of the red-figure style Hecht was impressed, just from this pencildrawing, and authorized his buyer to pay up to 2.5 million lire, the equivalent of about $4,200, ormore than $26,000 today in inflation-adjusted dollars

But when Hecht’s contact tried to negotiate the purchase with the suppliers, another middleman

stepped in and ruined the deal: Giacomo Medici, who bought the vase before Hecht could and sold it

to one of his most loyal clients When Hecht sent Medici a message that he would top whatever priceMedici had gotten, Medici wasted no time betraying his regular customer He concocted a story aboutthe cops being after the cup, and he offered a refund With the kylix back in his possession, Mediciarranged his first meeting with Hecht

It was past dark when Hecht’s middleman drove Medici to the rendezvous point in front of thehulking, stone Supreme Court building on the Lungotevere, the busy artery that runs along the TiberRiver They parked their car alongside Hecht’s, and Medici presented the cup Hecht closed the dealwith a flourish, asking Medici if he’d be happy with 2.2 million lire—700,000 lire more than Medicihad paid for it

Medici, showing little discretion, jumped for joy “Si!” Medici had no idea how badly he’d been

suckered

Soon after, Hecht sold the cup to a chemist in Basel for 60,000 Swiss francs—the equivalent of8.5 million lire Hecht had tripled his money, earning $9,500 At the same time, the wily Americanopened Medici’s eyes to an important principle of the trade: selling a single, high-quality object canbring much higher profit than pushing an endless string of minor antiquities—and with much lowerrisk because a single sale is less likely to be discovered by the police than a series of sales

About two months after the deal with Hecht, Medici’s trial for handling looted artifacts for hisfather finally ended On July 6, 1967, the Rome court convicted him of receiving looted antiquities Ajudge sentenced Giacomo to three months in jail and his father to four, but suspended their prison timebecause they had no previous convictions Giacomo Medici had suffered an ordeal and earned a

criminal record for pots that were little more than trinkets If he were going to take such legal risks inthe future, he would have to make it worth his while and deal in the good stuff instead—like Hechtdid

Hecht wasn’t just selling pots as a commodity He was selling vases as masterpieces to

collectors who could become obsessed Their need to possess meant they would always eventuallypay whatever Hecht asked Seeing the light, “Giacomo Medici quickly turned into a faithful supplier,”Hecht later wrote in a journal entry that would come back to haunt him

Joining the American dealer in the antiquities trade would be anything but safe Even in an era of

lax enforcement, Italian police and customs officials had their eyes on Hecht As far back as 1961,Rome prosecutors had charged him with a series of offenses, including the undeclared import to Italy

of a vase, ancient glass pieces, a Roman gold ring, and twenty-four collectible coins, and the illegalexport of three statuettes from Italy to Switzerland

The charges of smuggling to Switzerland (eventually dismissed in 1978, in part for lack of

evidence) were particularly important, because they exposed how dealers moved the loot they’d

bought from tomb robbers out of Italy and onto the international market Switzerland, just over theborder to the north, was the ideal first stop, because it lacked restrictions on selling antiquities

London and New York were the ultimate destinations, because that’s where the artifacts commandedthe highest prices There was almost no way to prove the loot had come from Italy because the Greekand Roman spheres of influence extended across what are now dozens of modern nations and their artcan be buried in these territories and trade routes

In some cases, proof of exact illicit origins did exist, even if it would take decades to surface In

1968, Hecht made a small sale to Dietrich von Bothmer, the Met’s curator of Greek and Roman art

The sale, of a silver dollar-sized vase fragment, would later have big implications, not just for Hecht,but for Medici, the Met, and the newest major American repository for antiquities, the J Paul GettyMuseum.

As a sideline to his work at the Met, von Bothmer bought vase fragments for his own collection.Whereas museums wanted pots that were as intact as possible, the curator sought shards They werepuzzle pieces that might complete an unknown, broken vase at some later date, orphans that he caredfor until they found their original homes As he had learned from Sir John Beazley at Oxford, thefragments were also wonderful teaching tools for his students

Von Bothmer bought this particular fragment from Hecht because of its pedigree He could tellfrom its style and shape that it was probably from Euphronios’s workshop and formed part of a kylixwine chalice The square-jawed curator was intimate with the details of every known pot either

painted or potted by the master, and this orphaned fragment had no documented home The cup towhich it belonged had yet to surface (and it might not ever appear) He’d wait

Von Bothmer scrawled a note on a bit of paper: “B.H ’68.” He stuck the paper on the fragmentand then filed the piece away in his office at the museum, along with the rest of the jetsam that

jammed his bookshelves waiting to make sense

For as long as humans have buried valuables in tombs, there have been tomb robbers So it wasn’t

long after the Etruscans buried their dead alongside masterpieces such as Euphronios’s Sarpedonkrater and chalice that pillagers targeted the necropolises of Caere, the ancient city that would

become modern Cerveteri Later generations of Etruscans, followed by their conquerors, the Romans,stole from the burial grounds, mostly to obtain the precious metals buried there, leaving behind othermaterials Under Roman rule the residents of Caere abandoned the ancient city and its mortuary

monuments, which were left exposed to scavengers and the natural elements

A thousand years later, the art of classical antiquity helped inspire the cultural reawakening ofthe Renaissance The Italian painters and sculptors who brought Western art out of the Middle Agesdrew upon the graceful human forms of Greek craftsmen and their Roman imitators The flowering inAthens, of which Euphronios had been a part, gave birth in Tuscany—the land of the Etruscans—tothe flowering of the Renaissance and its leaders, from Leonardo da Vinci to Michelangelo

From the 1700s, treasure hunters again targeted the burial grounds A century later, as modernarchaeology began to develop as a discipline, the Cerveteri necropolis finally benefited from fullydocumented excavation The results were a stunning sign of what can be learned about the past when

an intact tomb is found, recorded, and its contents preserved as a single burial unit—each object inthe context of the other

On April 21, 1836, the archpriest of Cerveteri, Alessandro Regolini, and General VincenzoGalassi uncovered a tomb that for two and a half millennia had evaded detection and pillage

Excavating under the authority of the pontifical government, the men found what’s known as a

corridor tomb, for its arrangement along a single line, cut into the rock under a mound just behindCerveteri’s old city Inside they discovered two intact burials, one of a royal woman and another of acremated man They also found a third occupant, without his own burial chamber, on a bronze bed

The burial goods the men cataloged included precious items made of gold and silver, decoratedwith miniature designs in a lost technique of metalworking, and everyday objects made of ivory,silver, and bronze, imported from elsewhere in the Mediterranean, including huge bronze urns and aset of silver jugs made in Phoenicia and Cyprus The royal woman was wearing a gold breastplate

embossed with a series of pictures, including a winged lion, a woman in a tunic, and grazing deer.Regolini and Galassi also found a chariot, ceramics, and, finally, sacred ornaments of various shapesand uses that gave evidence of the beliefs of the otherwise mysterious Etruscans.

Taken together, the contents of the tomb exposed a range of information, from trade routes andreligion to gender roles and local artistic abilities If such a tomb were found today and excavatedwith modern methods and lab work, it would yield even more information, including data about

animal and vegetable remains buried in the tomb, and the health of the human occupants

This one Cerveteri tomb found in 1836 remains one of the best tools for continuing to learn aboutthe Etruscans Instead of breaking up the find and shipping the finest pieces to various collectors andmuseums, as tomb robbers do, the archpriest and the general sent the tomb’s contents to Rome, wheretoday they form the nucleus of the Vatican Museums’ Etruscan collection

But once word got out that there was gold to be found in the burial mounds of Cerveteri, theunauthorized pillaging began and the chances of further reconstructing Etruscan life became harder.This enthusiasm to find buried treasure did bring to light the work of an artist whose name probablyhadn’t been uttered since many centuries before the birth of Jesus: Euphronios

Unheard since antiquity, the name Euphronios made its modern debut in 1828 in the ancient town

of Vulci, north of Cerveteri In that year, oxen plowing the land of Napoleon’s younger brother,

Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Canino, uncovered an Etruscan tomb The prince took charge of the digand quickly amassed a collection of thousands of antiquities, including two cups that bore

Euphronios’s name as potter

Euphronios’s vocation as a painter, however, wasn’t discovered until 1830, when a dig

elsewhere on the Vulci property turned up a kylix wine cup portraying Heracles accomplishing histenth labor: slaying Geryon, a three-bodied monster whose cattle the Greek hero needed to steal Oneside of the cup’s outer surface shows the bloody confrontation, while the other bears a herd of cowsdrawn in fine, detailed lines After failing to get high enough bids for the cup at auction in Paris in

1837, Prince Canino offered it on the London market in 1838 as part of a lot of 117 vases, two

Etruscan candelabra, and a mirror, known as his Reserve Etrusque But Canino’s asking price for the

haul was 4,000 pounds sterling—more than anyone was willing to pay

Finally, in 1841, the year after the Bonaparte prince died, King Ludwig I of Bavaria bought thecup, along with fifty others, at a spectacular auction in Frankfurt It was the last time a Euphronioswould be offered at public auction until the 1990 Hunt sale at Sotheby’s in New York The Bavarianking’s purchase, the only vase known at the time to be painted by Euphronios, ended up in Munich’sstate antiquities museum

Soon three other vases with Euphronios’s signature as painter surfaced—this time at Cerveteri

—in a collection that the Marchese Campana built by excavating on his landholdings between 1840and 1848 One pot was a nearly complete krater for mixing wine and water; another was just an

assortment of several fragments of what had once been a krater Each portrayed Heracles The Louvrebought both in 1861, and they remain at the Paris museum Campana’s third signed vase painted byEuphronios was a psykter for cooling wine; it showed a scene of a symposium drinking party,

including a picture of a reclining nude woman with kylix wine cup in hand The Hermitage museum in

St Petersburg bought that vase in 1862, and it has remained there ever since

The fifth vase signed by Euphronios as painter—and the last to appear for nearly a century—turned up at the Acropolis in Athens during an excavation in 1882 This wine cup was the rare find of

a Euphronios that actually stayed in the city where it was made, rather than being exported to

Cerveteri or Vulci where the other four had been brought and then buried by Etruscans Only a few

fragments remained of the cup found in Greece, but they included a trace of Euphronios’s name andpictures of Athena and other figures Today it is in the Athens National Archaeological Museum.

Over the past century, Euphronios’s fame and the rarity of his works made his kraters and cups avaluable commodity, traded only in secrecy, and usually just for the consumption of the great

European museums Until the 1990 Hunt auction, the chase for Euphronios would be a game played bytomb robbers, smugglers, university professors, and, crucially, curators from museums in Berlin,Boston, Paris, Malibu, Munich, and, eventually, New York

In Rome, Giacomo Medici had made enough money by 1968 that he finally opened his own gallery,

Antiquaria Romana, at Via del Babuino 94, a block from Piazza di Spagna Medici quickly started tomix with the art elite and found no official resistance to the business he was doing Medici was oncordial terms with Superintendent Moretti, in part through Medici’s late client, the pharmaceuticalexecutive Pesciotti Moretti’s assistant, Giuseppe Proietti, a freshly graduated archaeologist fromRome’s top public university, La Sapienza, gave Medici research bulletins of stolen items that

dealers and the police should be on the lookout for With a gallery of his own, Medici traveled toSwitzerland on business for the first time

However, at some point in the late 1960s, the national Carabinieri paramilitary police decided

to get even more serious about art crime On May 3, 1969, they formed an art and cultural heritageunit, and they were out to show results The timing of Medici’s debut as an international dealer

couldn’t have been worse

As Medici took his first steps into the high-stakes international market, he found he needed more

protection in the form of more and better documentation that could lend a sheen of clean provenance

to objects with illicit origins Fortunately for Medici, Oxford—which Professor Beazley had made acenter of vase studies—had recently gotten into the trade Around 1970, the university’s ResearchLaboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art began supplementing its meager budget by

charging private clients to date ceramic pots and statues through thermoluminescence, or TL, a

procedure Oxford had pioneered TL could measure how much radiation a clay object had absorbedsince the day its creator originally fired it in a kiln—a procedure that resets its radiation content tozero Based on the amount of naturally occurring radiation that it had absorbed since, the Oxford

archaeologists could estimate the date of manufacture

The Oxford scientists, running the business out of the lab’s redbrick Victorian row house,

collected powdery samples that had been drilled out of the bases of the artworks For the right price,they would even make house calls to clients in Switzerland Crucially, they would issue a stampedcertificate bearing the Oxford University name and attesting to the artifact’s age An undocumented,looted antiquity could now have a pedigree of sorts, having passed through the oldest university in theEnglish-speaking world

For Medici and the other merchants, the Oxford certificate became obligatory for any vase thatlacked information about its origins Medici’s buyers could be free to assume, incorrectly, that

Oxford would only test objects with legitimate origins Over the years, Medici ran about a hundredsuch tests at Oxford, paying the university some $400,000

No amount of documentation, however, could stop the transformation that was sweeping the

antiquities industry The era of digging and dealing that had made Giacomo Medici an antiquarianofficially ended in 1970, just as he was about to make it big.

In Paris, what should have been an otherwise obscure session of a UN cultural panel convened

on October 12, 1970 Delegates to the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural

Organization’s general conference spent a month hammering out ways to answer a question that wasbecoming increasingly important to countries from South America to Asia to Europe: how to blockthe smuggling of cultural property

For the first time, an international body put in writing what source countries such as Italy hadbeen trying in vain to tell the rest of the world: wealthy collectors and museums should stop acquiringantiquities that had been ripped from their archaeological contexts

UNESCO declared that cultural property “constitutes one of the basic elements of civilizationand national culture, and that its true value can be appreciated only in relation to the fullest possibleinformation regarding its origin.” And it decreed that nations should halt the illicit export or import ofcultural property removed from source countries The convention only applied to nations that agreed

to become signatories, and UNESCO couldn’t bring prosecutions But as an ethical matter, the 1970UNESCO convention became the new moral standard

It was ratified in Paris on November 17, 1970, and that date became the dividing line: dealersand collectors who bought or sold artifacts unearthed after that day knew they were doing somethingthey shouldn’t But they also knew that anything that had been in circulation before that date was

kosher on the international market, even if local laws had been broken in acquiring it

For Giacomo Medici, Robert Hecht, and Dietrich von Bothmer, everything changed that day inParis when UNESCO signed the agreement and shut the door on illicit antiquities The only wiggleroom in the pact was that, technically, the convention wouldn’t go into force until April 24, 1972

Medici would soon learn that he needed as much wiggle room as he could get Just before

Christmas 1971, a band of his diggers north of Rome discovered a tomb complex unlike any everseen

For the tomb robbers in late 1971, the clink, clink, clink of their long, steel probes was the sound

they’d been waiting for After systematically combing the countryside north of Rome for potentialancient riches, they had found the stone roofs of buried Etruscan tombs

All signs had pointed to this remote corner of Cerveteri as good hunting grounds This particularspot—known both as Greppe Sant’Angelo for a nearby shrine bearing the image of an angel, andSant’Antonio, after a nearby rural chapel by that name—sat smack on the central path that had cutthrough the center of the ancient city Another draw was that Greppe Sant’Angelo was haunted

The evening shadows in Cerveteri always fall first in Sant’Angelo, which sits on the steep slope

of a long, craggy cliff that faces southeast, away from the sunset For generations, these shadows hadgiven rise to local legend According to tradition, no inhabitant of Cerveteri will venture into

Sant’Angelo after dusk, for fear of the ghost spirit known as the Shadow or the Demon of GreppeSant’Angelo The Shadow, who only appears after sundown, has just one job: to guard the ancientEtruscan tombs there, scaring away trespassers with his horrendous apparitions

The long-dead occupants of the tombs needed the Shadow’s services because, according to

legend, incredible treasures lay beneath the ground of Sant’Angelo

Anyone experienced at clandestine digs could tell from Sant’Angelo’s rough terrain that theanomalous curves in the ground and patterns in the undergrowth were signs that something man-made

sat beneath the surface Like pro golfers reading a putting green, experienced tombaroli could see the

hidden hills and troughs On a night in November 1971, the tomb robbers explored a patch of land that

had promise It lay near the edge of the clifflike greppe ridge, and it had a strange, curved mound

poking ever so slightly from the soil

An Italian tomb robber’s tool kit includes two key pieces: a shovel and a spillo (a spike), a yard

or two long with a handle on one end The team at Greppe Sant’Angelo paced back and forth aroundthe overgrown turf, jamming their spillos into the soil Again and again the spikes drove through thesoil, failing to hit any underground chambers Over the years, mud and gravel had run off from thetown and fields just above the spot where the men were exploring Century after century, sludge hadcome down the ridge during rainfalls and filled in the ravine that, according to legend, contained lost

tombs Crucially to the tombaroli, the soil had obscured the true location of the face of the ridge,

which was where they knew they might find tomb openings

A man known as Peppe the Calabrese—actually Giuseppe Montaspro, a thirty-seven-year-oldoriginally from the southern region of Calabria—led what started out as a core group of three

excavators and two assistants who would mostly serve as lookouts It was a tight-knit crew, somerelated to each other by marriage They all lived in the neighborhood just a few blocks away fromGreppe Sant’Angelo, on the edge of the Etruscan wilderness As they poked the ground again andagain, finding nothing but soil beneath, they occasionally came up with the much-awaited, satisfying

sensation vibrating up the steel shaft: the clink of something hard lying deep under their feet.

Clink, the spillo went, and they took note of the spot, walking a couple of paces, with their backs

to the center of Cerveteri, toward what they believed was the ancient edge of the ridge Clink, the

pole went again, and again they stepped forward, repeating the procedure until they found a spot withjust soil Slowly, as they kept track of which spots clinked and which spots mushed, Peppe and histeam made a mental map of the underground terrain When they could reliably trace the stone line thatmarked the face of the buried ridge, they started to dig

It was one thing for Peppe and his two other excavators, forty-year-old Adriano Presciutti andforty-one-year-old Giuseppe Padroni, to wander around poking the ground, but this adventure took on

a whole new level of risk once they started removing soil Although the land where they dug seemedlike undeveloped wilderness, it wasn’t completely off the radar In fact, they were trespassing onprivate property They assumed correctly that there was little chance that the land’s owner, an old andprosperous Roman, would stumble upon them But what they hadn’t counted on was that the owner’scaretaker, forty-six-year-old Cerveteri native Giovanni Temperi, might come by looking for intruders

Making his rounds, Temperi reached the tombaroli just as they were beginning their work But

instead of this becoming a disaster, it turned out that Temperi was a man who could be reasoned with.Instead of ratting on the robbers, he joined the digging In exchange they would pay him a cut fromwhatever they found and sold

Theirs was a huge undertaking Having identified a spot on the face of the ridge, they dug straightdown At first the hole looked like any pit, surrounded on all sides by soil Then, a couple yards

below the surface, the stone they had clinked from above emerged on one side To their delight, itwasn’t a naturally occurring ridge, but a stack of cinder-block-like bricks quarried thousands of yearsbefore from yellowish, porous rock As they had suspected, based on formations in other parts ofCerveteri, the Etruscans had built tombs atop the ridge—and Peppe and his men had found the

beginnings of a tomb’s outer wall Locating an entrance would take even more digging

To help with the heavy labor, they enlisted three more men, including a thirty-two-year-old

farmer named Francesco Bartocci and an out-of-work farmhand, Armando Cenere The stocky,

thirty-six-year-old Cenere, who’d dropped out of school in first grade to support his widowed mother, hadbeen part of other bands of Cerveteri tomb robbers before Cenere knew he could expect a share ofthe haul if he did his job and kept his mouth shut For the most part they worked at night, but with thecaretaker onboard, they also dug in broad daylight.

They dug deeper and deeper, following the stone wall downward more than fifteen feet, a level

at which they reckoned they might find a tomb door Based on their earlier soundings with their steel

spikes, the tombaroli took their search westward along the wall Instead of digging down, they dug

sideways, creating a tunnel along the rock, supporting it from the inside with wood planks Over theyears, the tomb walls had only partly held up under the weight of the runoff above them Some hadcaved in, and as the diggers made their way, foot by foot, they encountered a scattered assortment oftomb debris This is when the men made their first sellable discovery: a five-hundred-pound stonelion

The lion was plain, made out of rough, local stone, and it wasn’t a masterpiece It was a sign,however, that they were on the right track It could also be a sign to anyone who stumbled on theirclandestine dig site—whether competitors or law enforcement—that there might be something ofinterest there They had to get the lion out Bartocci helped the men remove the piece, which wasabout three feet tall, and loaded it onto his truck and drove it to a plot of land his family owned

farther southwest of Greppe Sant’Angelo They sold the statue within days—so quickly that it wasalready circulating in the global antiquities market before the men made an even greater discovery—one that for some of them would be the highlight of their lives

November turned to December as they continued digging The nights got longer and colder, andBartocci the farmer donned a wool military overcoat that barely warded off the chill as he stood at

his lookout post on the top of the greppe Initially, their plan seemed to be working First came the

lion, and then the door to a tomb, but they found nothing of any worth inside If someone with richgrave goods had been buried there, another tomb robber from another time—maybe Etruscan or

Roman—had gotten there first So they kept digging their tunnel, always wary of possible cave-ins Atregular intervals they drove narrow air shafts from the surface into the tunnel to provide some oxygen

They found another tomb door, and then another—with more near-worthless statues, some

pottery shards, and some fragmented tombstones with inscriptions of the names of the dead It was notreasure, but it was getting better and better The bits of ancient pottery meant the stakes were nowhigher, and the team would need extra protection against the police and, perhaps even worse, rivalgangs of looters Convinced he’d found a spot worth protecting, Peppe asked Cenere the farmhand tojoin Bartocci on guard duty As the two men stood above in the darkness, Peppe’s men dug to whatwas their fourth or fifth tomb opening From their tunnel they arrived at a doorway standing six feethigh and three feet wide Clearing away a bit of rubble, they entered the somewhat collapsed butmostly intact remains of an Etruscan burial chamber

For the first time in some two thousand years, light poked through to illuminate the ancient

treasures inside The men hauled out statues of a winged sphinx and a panther They fished out allmanner of painted ceramic vessels—covered in dirt but mostly intact There were museum-qualitypelikes, used in antiquity for transporting liquids such as olive oil, and psykters, vessels that had beenused for cooling wine at drinking parties They even hauled out kylixes—the chalices out of which theparticipants in those drinking parties would imbibe

All of those would add up to a nice little income But sitting on the floor of the tomb’s maincorridor was a vase that might make them rich

It was a krater pot for mixing wine, signed by Euphronios as its painter And it was broken into

dozens of fragments as if someone had carelessly dropped it on his way through the hallway a couplethousand years before, and not bothered to sweep up the shards.

Even though it was shattered, Peppe and his men knew they had a masterpiece that would makethe whole venture worthwhile The fact that nobody in antiquity had bothered to clean up the

fragments worked to their advantage, too, because at first glance it looked like every single bit of thekrater was there Not wanting to mix up the krater with fragments from other, lesser vases, the menpiled the pieces into plastic shopping bags They dragged the bags out of the tomb into the tunnel andpassed them up the entry shaft to the men keeping watch Bartocci, standing in his military overcoat ontop of the ridge, peered inside one of two white shopping bags that he saw the diggers pass up, filledwith fragments By the illumination of his flashlight he saw the glow of a reddish warrior holding asword

The men passed around another fragment About the size of a man’s hand, the ocher-and-blackhunk of pottery was unusual enough—with its fine lines and detailed anatomy—that Peppe’s men hadtheir farmhand guard, Cenere, take a look Once he saw it, the image was burned in his memory As

he would later tell the police, Armando Cenere saw, depicted in orange against a dark background, “aman who was bleeding.”

Sarpedon was neither Trojan nor Greek, but a prince of Lycia, a kingdom to the south of Troy that

sent its warriors to help defend the cosmopolitan Trojans from the Greek onslaught Although he hadthe fortune of being a son of the most powerful god on Mount Olympus, this child of Zeus had a mortalmother, making him as vulnerable on the battlefield as any other man

The confrontation that sealed Sarpedon’s fate began when the Trojans launched a surprise attack

on the Greek ships beached on the shore They swarmed toward Achilles; his closest friend,

Patroclus; and their Greek troops Patroclus was the first to throw his shiny spear at the advancingtroops, and he led the army on a counterattack, wearing Achilles’ armor

Achilles did his part not by taking up weapons—but by taking up a chalice Achilles steppedinto his tent, where he opened a trunk filled with rugs and cloaks and pulled out a wine cup Achilles’chalice was made of silver In the courtyard of his camp, Achilles poured the wine into the cup, andstaring up at the heavens, prayed to Zeus Achilles asked Zeus to grant his closest comrade, Patroclus,success in repelling the onslaught that threatened to push the Greeks into the sea He also prayed thatPatroclus would return unharmed

Zeus would grant only half the prayer He had other concerns: his son Sarpedon was fast

approaching the center of the battle, riding his chariot drawn by a team of three warhorses

Amid the clanging of swords and stench of battle, Patroclus rallied the Greeks “Slaughter

Trojans!” he cried as he split skulls and severed limbs The Trojans turned and ran from the beach, ifthey could Others found themselves trapped in the Greeks’ defensive trench, where Patroclus and hismen butchered them Patroclus, circling his chariot behind the Trojan line, blocked the retreat, piling

up corpses Sarpedon, son of Zeus, might have understood the Trojans running from the fight, but hewouldn’t tolerate his own Lycian troops fleeing

“Lycians, where is your pride? Where are you running?” Sarpedon admonished his men Then,eyeing Patroclus, he added, “I’ll take him on myself.”

Sarpedon jumped from his chariot, weapons drawn As soon as Patroclus saw what was

happening, he, too, leapt down Like two vultures with claws and beaks ablaze, the warriors

screamed toward each other with their battle cries Zeus, watching from the heavens and knowing the

future, was distraught “My cruel fate,” he said to his wife, the goddess Hera “My Sarpedon, the man

I love the most, my own son—doomed to die at the hands of Patroclus.”

But there was something Zeus could do As the king of the gods, it was within his power to alterfate and save Sarpedon Yet at what cost? “My heart is torn in two as I try to weigh all this Shall Ipluck him up now, while he’s still alive and set him down in the rich green land of Lycia, far from thewar at Troy and all its tears?” Zeus asked his wife, who, importantly, was not the mother of his sonSarpedon

Hera protested “What are you saying? A man, a mere mortal, his doom sealed long ago? You’dset him free from the many pains of death?” she asked Zeus “Do as you please,” she said, and thenslyly reminded him that he couldn’t afford to offend his fellow gods “If you send Sarpedon homealive, I warn you, then some other god will want to sweep down on the battlefield and rescue his sonfrom the fighting, too,” she said “As precious as he is to you, and your heart grieves for him, leaveSarpedon to die there in the brutal attack

“But once his soul and final breath have left him, send the god Death to carry him home, andsend the soothing god Sleep to help accompany him home to Lycia There his countrymen will buryprince Sarpedon with full royal rites,” Hera said, sealing her argument—and Sarpedon’s fate

Zeus agreed, but not without first making a grand gesture He showered tears of blood onto theland, drenching the plains of Troy As the rain of blood poured down in praise of the son who wasabout to die far from his homeland, Sarpedon and Patroclus closed in on each other To reach histarget, Patroclus had to take out the men running defense for Sarpedon First he speared the aide onSarpedon’s side, piercing his guts and making his limbs go limp Sarpedon attacked back, hurling alance at Patroclus But he missed, instead hitting one of the stallions from Patroclus’s chariot,

stabbing the horse’s right shoulder and sending it down screaming in the dust Sarpedon tried again,throwing his spear at Patroclus The shaft whizzed over the Greek’s left shoulder, never even

touching Patroclus

Patroclus pounced, hurling his spear The bronze spearhead pierced Sarpedon’s midriff, right atthe heart As Homer recounted, the Lycian prince toppled like an oak, or a tall pine that’s been cutdown by woodsmen for making ships Sarpedon, like a bull mauled by a lion, raged in the dust,

screaming for his men to defend his body and make sure the Greeks wouldn’t strip his corpse of itsarmor in what would be the final indignity “Fight for me!” he yelled “You’ll hang your head in

shame every day of your life if the Greeks strip my armor Spur our men to battle!”

Those were to be Sarpedon’s last words As the son of Zeus choked on his last breath, Patroclusstepped over to Sarpedon, planted a heel on his chest, grabbed the spear embedded in the fallen hero,and gave it a yank As Patroclus pulled his weapon from the wound, Sarpedon’s innards came with it

With Sarpedon dead, the fight for his body and its armor began, claiming even more lives Aband of Lycian shieldsmen surrounded the corpse while others, joined by Trojan allies, went on theoffensive against the Greeks, who lusted for more of Sarpedon’s blood and pride “If only we couldgrab his body, mutilate him, shame him, tear his gear off his back,” one of the Greek soldiers

declared Both sides battled around and on top of the body Zeus, who’d done nothing to stop hisson’s death, turned day into night to make the fight for the body both blind and bloody

A Greek managed to grab Sarpedon’s corpse, but instead of making off with it, he met the fury ofHector, supreme commander of the Trojans and a son of Troy’s king It was now Hector’s turn toinflict pain on the Greeks Hector lifted a rock and smashed it into the head of the Greek, splitting hisskull within his helmet The Greek fell face-first onto Sarpedon’s body As the slaughter continued,nobody could make out the Lycian prince’s lifeless form, which got buried deeper and deeper in a

pile of blood, weapons, and dirt Looking down from the heavens, Zeus mused on the ways to getrevenge on his son’s killer, Patroclus Should he have someone finish him off now, over his son’scorpse, or let him fight on?

Zeus decided to let Patroclus continue the fight Hector, the Trojan leader, sounded the retreatback toward the city walls As Hector took to his chariot and spun around back toward Troy, he leftSarpedon’s body defenseless The Greeks descended, ripping the shiny, bronze armor from his

corpse

Zeus had had enough Before the dismemberment could start, he ordered the god Apollo to clearthe weapons off Sarpedon and to carry him off the battlefield Apollo took Sarpedon away from theflying arrows and spears to the safety of a river where he washed his body, anointed it with fragrantoil, and wrapped it in robes worthy of the gods Then, following Zeus’s orders, Apollo sent Sarpedonoff to his homeland, carried as swift as the wind by the twin brothers Sleep and Death In his demise,

Sarpedon, son of the greatest god, became the Christ figure of Homer’s Iliad, lifted by Sleep and

Death in a scene reminiscent of both the removal from the cross and the resurrection

The twins set down the corpse in the green fields of Lycia, where Sarpedon could finally findpeace

Christmas came early to the tombaroli of Cerveteri in 1971 In all, it took eight days to clear the

tomb of the goods that could be sold—and to destroy any of the surrounding archaeological evidence,which had been untouched for millennia yet was ruined in a couple months The structure of the tombwent unrecorded along with the placement of the grave goods in it Peppe and his men discarded anyunsellable material they might have found, whether remains of food offerings, shreds of ancient

textiles, or human bones Any such ancient evidence could have provided clues to who had been

buried at this site, and it may even have helped make the mysterious Etruscans a little less mysterious

What the tombaroli had found was far more than just a single tomb It was an entire, previously

unknown necropolis that in some places took the form of an apartment building for the dead The

complex boasted the first rock-cut Etruscan tombs ever found; all other known tombs of that era hadbeen constructed from stacking blocks of stone, rather than chiseling into the earth It also containedthe earliest known vaulted arch in Etruria And the riches inside were unparalleled Just based onwhat survived the sacking and made it to public collections, art histories needed to be rewritten

As the tomb robbers searched for more loot, the destruction went beyond negligence of the

historic record and descended to outright vandalism Having dug more than fifteen feet below the

modern surface of Greppe Sant’Angelo, the tombaroli found another door, made out of a local, soft

speckled stone called pep-perino and carved in relief with a geometric decoration of circles andboxes Behind the door, the men reasoned, might sit another chamber with even more valuable

artifacts So they hacked away at the ancient carving When they managed to break through, they foundonly a stone wall behind it They had smashed a decorative false door for nothing

Underground, the men kept digging as New Year’s approached Aboveground, in the meantime,they had money to make They knew the krater depicting the “man who was bleeding” was their

biggest prize The men had driven the plastic bags containing the krater’s pieces to the home of thecaretaker, Giovanni Temperi, on Via Toscana, at the edge of Cerveteri There, in the cellar of thetwo-story house, the gang recomposed the pieces they had picked up from the floor of the tomb Asthe puzzle came together, it appeared that hardly a sliver of clay was missing They didn’t glue thefragments into position, but placed the bits close enough together to tell they had a nearly complete

They didn’t want too many people to see what they had or know where they had stored it

However, it didn’t seem like much of a problem to allow a twenty-two-year-old blind woman namedPina into the cellar to lay her hands on the fragments They knew from the inscriptions that the vasehad been in the hands of Euphronios himself, and Pina, a sort of hanger-on to the tomb-robbing gang,wanted her hands to pass over the glazed terra-cotta, too The blond blind woman won access to the

hoard because her sister was married to one of the three tombaroli leaders, Presciutti, and she was

the sister of the lookout Francesco Bartocci Weeks before, she had already had the chance to touchthe rough surface of the stone lion that had been stored at the Bartocci property Holding the thickshards of the Sarpedon krater between her fingers was an entirely more moving experience, yieldingthe sensation of a smooth surface that was dotted and crisscrossed by the raised relief lines that

Euphronios had applied

As much as Pina and her friends admired the find, however, the tomb robbers were in this for themoney They needed to move the merchandise out of Cerveteri as quickly as possible If they were tocash in on their Euphronios krater, they would have to do it now It was time to call Giacomo Medici

CHAPTER THREE

The “Hot Pot”

Peppe Montaspro’s crew gave Medici a call in December 1971, knowing he was a regular buyer ofantiquities who had something of a lock on Cerveteri artifacts Medici was told to meet up at an

apartment on Rome’s Via Francesco Crispi, a street that runs uphill toward the top of the SpanishSteps, not far from Medici’s shop Arriving at the apartment, Medici saw the magnificent krater, infragments, and knew he could not pass up what would be the greatest purchase of his career

Medici bought the krater, for probably around 50 million lire, or about $88,000 The tomb

robbers then paid Cenere and Bartocci 5 million lire each, about 10 percent of the krater proceedsper person, for their work on the seven-man team At about $8,500, it was a considerable cut for

barely two months’ work, and much more than what anyone in their neighborhood earned in a year.Cenere was happy with the payout—until he learned how much the dig’s leaders had made, and howmuch the krater was really worth on the international market

According to a slightly different version of events that police gleaned from confidential

informants in Cerveteri, the tomb robbers also had other grave goods to sell, including kylixes,

psykters, and panther statues, which they sold directly to Robert Hecht in Temperi’s home on ViaToscana, with Medici acting as middleman Exactly which cups and vases were on the block—andwhether they included Euphronios’s Sarpedon chalice—wasn’t recorded in the police reports taken atthe time Hecht has denied that this transaction ever happened, and police and prosecutors have neversuccessfully brought charges based on that portion of the police intelligence However, the essence ofthe story—that Hecht got his hands on terrific merchandise around that time—would bear out

By contrast, the path that Euphronios’s Sarpedon krater took has become much clearer Afterbuying the krater, Medici photographed it with a Polaroid instant camera Shooting regular film of alooted artifact and then taking it to a commercial photo shop would have been foolhardy With thepictures in hand, he could move the actual merchandise out of the country while still being able tomarket the krater with the Polaroids As a known antiquities dealer, it would also be foolish for him

to try smuggling the vase out of Italy Instead he turned to one of his trusted mules in the north, a man

in Milan who took the heavy box of fragments across the border to Switzerland There the krater

would sit until Medici could find a buyer who could pay enough to bring him a hefty profit on hisinvestment of nearly $90,000

Medici didn’t need to go far One morning in the final days of 1971, Medici came calling at theHecht residence at Villa Pepoli Robert and his wife, Elizabeth, had just finished breakfast whenMedici walked in the door and presented them with the photos of the hulking, foot-and-a-half-highkrater by Euphronios Hecht couldn’t believe his eyes His wife was so astounded she thought it might

be a fake “Is this for real?” Elizabeth exclaimed The American dealer had to see the thing for

himself

Within an hour, Hecht and Medici had caught the next flight to Milan They ate lunch at Le

Colline Pistoiesi, a Tuscan restaurant that decades later would be the focus of the Mafia trial of one

of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s closest allies Then Medici and Hecht hopped a train to

Lugano, across the border in Switzerland where Medici had stored the piece beyond the reach ofItalian law Once Hecht saw the fragmented krater at Medici’s secure hiding place—a safe-depositbox—the negotiations didn’t last long They settled on 1.5 million Swiss francs, about $350,000 atthe time, to be paid in installments Medici was more than tripling his money

By that evening Hecht had taken the krater to Zurich, where he dropped it off at the home

workshop of Fritz Bürki, his faithful vase restorer, and paid Medici $40,000—all the cash Hechtcould get his hands on The vase was his, and he just had to come up with the rest of the money Forthe moment, he could celebrate Hecht returned to Rome to pick up his family and took them back tonorthern Italy for their Christmas vacation in the ski resort of Courmayeur, near the French border As

he would later recall in a handwritten memoir, it was truly a good vacation

When he returned from the break, Hecht tackled the double task of finding a buyer for the kraterwho would make him a quick profit and getting the remaining money to pay Medici Along with

another dealer, Hecht had bought a life-size bronze eagle that they’d been trying to offload They hadapproached the Met, the Los Angeles County Museum, and a museum in Fort Worth, Texas, all with

no luck Hecht got permission from his partner to take what they could for the eagle, and he wentahead and sold the piece to his competitor, London dealer Robin Symes, for $75,000 This extra cashwould keep Medici happy as he waited for the final payout

As for finding a buyer for the krater, the first signs were bad Hecht tried Sotheby’s in London,but the antiquities chief there, Felicity Nicholson, gave the pot an estimate of just $200,000, much toolow for Hecht He tried another option A Danish ship-owner he knew of might buy it on behalf ofCopenhagen’s Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek museum But that deal also fell through The new year wasn’tstarting nearly as well as 1971 had ended

To get a deal rolling, Hecht sent a cryptic, handwritten note in early February 1972 to his oldclient at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, curator Dietrich von Bothmer

The note referred to an earlier correspondence the two men had had about Beazley’s Attic

Red-Figure Vase-Painters, 2nd edition, the Oxford don’s definitive catalog of Greek pots painted in the

style of Euphronios and his cohort Then Hecht continued: “If something like p 14, no 2 were inPERFECT condition & complete, would it merit a gigantic effort, a really gigantic effort?”

Hecht’s puzzle made perfect sense to von Bothmer, who gathered all the relevant books andphotos that he could and prepared to make the pitch to his boss, the young director of the museum,Thomas Hoving

Hoving, who was then forty-two years old, had pulled off an improbable rise since originallyjoining the Met in 1959 After being promoted to head of the Met’s uptown Cloisters outpost, hishyperactive charisma, social connections, and political support of New York mayor John Lindsaywon him a stint as New York City’s parks commissioner—making him, technically, the Met’s

landlord In 1967, after the sudden death of the museum’s director, James Rorimer, the Met’s trusteeshad hired Hoving back from city government to run the whole place He did his best to make his mark,

in part through acquisitions

In Cerveteri, the tomb robbers were laying a puzzle of their own Gossip about their amazing haul,

including the Sarpedon krater by Euphronios, would surely start to spread By the time they finished

their work in February 1972, they’d had a good haul, and it was time to cover up the evidence,

literally The band’s last task was to refill the pit and tunnel, shoveling the soil back in It would be

as if the tomb never existed By randomly mixing in dirt, debris, and archaeological remains at all

depths and positions in the site, the tombaroli also completed their task of forever destroying the

record of the artifacts’ original placements in the strata of history, which are so important to

archaeologists for dating their finds

Then, to throw investigators off their trail of the krater, the men purposely abandoned one oftheir finds—a sphinx made of travertine marble—inside the Greppe Sant’Angelo site Chatter aboutthe dig had been spreading for months, and it would help cool things down if law enforcement wereunder the impression that they had cracked the case So the men tipped off the Guardia di Finanza, thefinance police, which in a way was an offering to the gods, or a kickback to the cultural authorities Ifthe clandestine diggers were lucky, the discovery by the cops would end any investigation before itstarted But they couldn’t have been more mistaken Before the end of February, the Finanza organized

an emergency excavation of the site

The finance police didn’t have the same level of patience that archaeologists have They begantheir excavation using mechanical diggers normally found on construction sites These officers, whohad nothing to do with the competing Carabinieri art squad that was expert in such things, peeled back

foot after foot of soil that had been the roof of the tombaroli tunnel By sheer muscle they sunk a

trench five yards deep—as deep as the pit the clandestine diggers had dug—and exposed a section ofthe ridge face that was dotted with tomb openings

The spot where the Finanza dug took them right to the front of the decorated false door that thetomb robbers had mutilated with their hammers And in front of the door, they found the winged

sphinx the men had left, along with what appeared to be the detached, curly-haired head of the

creature The finance police, working with Italian state archaeologists whom they had called to thescene, also unearthed a rough statue of a lion, a virtual twin to the five-hundred-pound creature the

tombaroli had found and sold months before As they gathered their evidence, the investigators

hauled up a mix of archaeological flotsam and jetsam: from stone carvings of two bearded heads topieces of tombstones that bore fragments of the names of the dead, forever disassociated from theiroriginal resting places

In all, the Finanza took possession of more than seven hundred bits of bronze statues and pottery,which the robbers had discarded, and turned those over to the state antiquities authority Peppe’s ganghad already gotten everything that mattered to them Or so they thought One of the other hazards ofdigging without proper archaeological techniques is that a tomb robber is bound to leave behind afragment or two of ancient pottery Inconveniently for Peppe and his men, they had left behind a fewfragments they shouldn’t have

The morning after von Bothmer received Hecht’s coded note, he walked into Hoving’s office at

9:00 A.M., a minute after the Met director had gotten there himself The curator read the note to

Hoving and then, following the clues, opened the Beazley tome to page 14 Figure number 2 was aEuphronios Hoving knew it well: it was the Louvre’s fragmentary krater on which the Athenian

master had painted Heracles in a wrestling match If Hecht’s message was to be understood correctly,his reference to “something like” the fragmentary Louvre krater, but “in perfect condition,” meant that

he had a complete krater by Euphronios to sell, the likes of which had not been seen for thousands ofyears

The men from the Met were interested, but Hecht was indulging his competitive side at a tenniscamp in Spain Hoving let the deal percolate Von Bothmer, however, whose passion for vases hadbeen kindled by Euphronios decades before, couldn’t hold back He sent word to Hecht that theywanted to know the price Then, a month later, in March 1972, Hecht made his next move The

antiquities dealer wrote to von Bothmer, but the somewhat cryptic pitch was clearly intended for vonBothmer’s boss, Hoving:

Regarding p 14 of Jackie Dear’s red I made a hint asking if you and your trusted associateswould make a super gigantic effort Now please imagine this broken, but COMPLETE and

in PERFECT STATE—by complete I mean 99 44/100% and by “perfect state” I mean

brilliant, not weathered It would hardly be incorrect to say that such a thing could be

considered the best of its kind—I don’t say that necessarily it is, but…it’s hard to find

competitors

Assuming the first part of above para to be the case, would it be able to be considered

in terms of a specific painting (as, i.e more or less the flags at that beach resort in France

by Monet or someone, rather than a pot) The equivalent might be available and I would

then discuss it with you But if a priori the trusted ones would think in terms of pots, it

would be best not to begin

Hoving could figure this one out himself “Jackie” was John Beazley, and “red” was a

red-figured krater The beach resort by Monet was Terrasse à Sainte-Adresse, for which the Met had

paid $1.4 million in 1967 Hoving laughed with disbelief, because Hecht actually seemed to be

asking $1.4 million for a Greek vase—about ten times the highest price previously paid for an ancientceramic pot He told von Bothmer to press Hecht for photos and further specifications

It turned out that Hecht had commissioned his restorer, Bürki, to do a rough rebuilding of thekrater’s many fragments In his Zurich studio, Bürki was lightly gluing the pieces together so that thevase would stand on its own It was a jigsaw puzzle in three dimensions, with little slivers missinghere and there that he filled in with tiny bits of red plastic On Hecht’s orders, Bürki didn’t do a finalglue job and he didn’t paint in the hairline cracks with black ink the way he would on a finished

product Hecht wanted von Bothmer and Hoving to get an honest look at the vase And because thepuzzle really did appear to come together more than 99 percent complete, the honest look was sure towin Hecht a high price

In a small town like Cerveteri, it’s hard to keep the news of a huge haul quiet The tombaroli who

uncovered the Euphronios krater hadn’t gotten rich, but they had enough lire to go on shopping sprees,and their neighbors noticed at least one new car cruising the streets of Cerveteri That, combined withthe finance police’s discovery of the marble sphinx and other artifacts abandoned at Sant’Angelo,caused the cultural authorities to deduce that this was a patch of land they should get to know a littlebetter

Under the 1939 antiquities law that declared all ancient artifacts found on Italian soil the

property of the state, the government had broad authority to take possession not just of movable

objects, but of land, too Italy could take over terrain on a temporary basis to make sure none of its

underground property was stolen or mistreated, or it could grab real estate on a permanent basis,paying compensation to the owners.

The archaeological superintendency for Etruscan lands around Rome, led by Mario Moretti,suspected that archaeological artifacts were “hidden underground” on six hectares—about fourteenacres—and on March 30, 1972, the Ministry of Public Instruction notified the Piscini family that their

land was being put under an archaeological vincolo The government had essentially landmarked the

semiwild terrain The owners couldn’t legally build anything there without special permission

Perhaps more important, Moretti and his protégé in charge of Cerveteri—Giuseppe Proietti—were keeping an eye on what would soon unfold at the site

Hecht had to wait until the end of the spring before the krater was fixed and photographed, and

finally on a Friday at the start of June 1972, he flew to New York with the pictures Von Bothmer was

at his country house in Centre Island, at Oyster Bay on Long Island’s north shore, and invited his dealer friend out for the weekend Once inside, he handed over the black-and-white prints to the

art-eager curator “The Met certainly needs to come into possession of this,” von Bothmer let loose.With his mission already accomplished, Hecht turned his attention to the von Bothmer family.The curator had married Joyce Blaffer, the widow of a French marquis and daughter of Robert LeeBlaffer, a cofounder of Humble Oil, which became part of Exxon Hecht played tennis against vonBothmer’s pretty stepdaughter, Diane, and then took a dip in the pool with the whole family, whichincluded von Bothmer’s precocious son, Bernard, who at about seven years old was already fluent inthe arcane details of Greek mythology Afterward, von Bothmer’s wife served dinner, and Hechtspent the night at the house First thing on Monday, he and von Bothmer drove to the museum together

to show the pictures to Hoving

The Met’s director liked what he saw, but seeing pictures was only a first step Hoving told vonBothmer he wanted to see the vase in person To do so, they’d have to travel to Zurich, where Hechthad been keeping the pot at Bürki’s lab Hoving flew from New York to Zurich with von Bothmer,who was so consumed with excitement over seeing the new Euphronios that he couldn’t shut up

during the flight For four hours von Bothmer yammered on, first about Hecht—presumably to assuageany possible doubts Hoving had about making a major purchase from the dealer—and then aboutEuphronios and vase painting of the early 500s B.C

What kept Hoving awake, at least for a while, was von Bothmer’s description of how

Euphronios had managed to paint the fine lines on the krater with dull, grayish glazes that kept theeventual colors invisible as he worked on the wet clay “Hundreds upon hundreds of never-

overlapping lines, the hair, the outlines of the bodies, he achieved all this complexity—much morethan the thousands of lines engraved on a ten-dollar bill-without ever seeing clearly what he’d justdrawn,” von Bothmer told his incredulous boss

“Dietrich, you’re shitting me,” Hoving said before dozing off for a half hour—the only sleephe’d get before having to negotiate what would be the most important acquisition of his career

As he dozed, Hoving couldn’t have dreamed of how the master painter and potter used ancient

alchemy to bring to life the krater that awaited them in Zurich—and its matching kylix wine cup,

which Hoving would soon encounter, too

Euphronios lived in the most dramatic political times in the story of Athens and the world,

seeing firsthand the birth of democracy In the world of art, the Greek master led his own revolution,

a creative flourishing that historians say was unrivaled until the Renaissance, some two thousandyears later Euphronios’s timing was perfect For hundreds of years, vase makers had produced

unrealistic depictions on their pots, using a color scheme in which the people were painted in black

on the orange background of the clay pots The effect was a backlit silhouette, where the figures hadless life to them than their golden surroundings

Then, shortly after 550 B.C., potters in Athens invented a way to draw black lines on the localred pottery, filling in the background with black and reversing the centuries-old black-figure effect.The resulting red-figure technique brought vase painting to life

By coincidence, at this same time, Peisistratus, an Athenian tyrant, ordered that Homer’s epics,which were recited orally and had spun out into several different versions, be committed to writing

Athenians suddenly had a standard version of the Iliad and Odyssey, on paper.

Inspired by the works of Homer—and armed with a vase decoration technique that allowed theclay’s natural color to shine through to represent the tanned bodies of gods and warriors in morerealistic colors—Euphronios and his cohorts established history’s earliest known “school” of art.They worked together in a part of Athens called the Kerameikos—a name taken from the word

keramos, or clay, from which our “ceramic” is derived Euphronios and his coterie of painters are

known today as the Pioneers for the mark they made by popularizing the red-figure style A dozenpainters from the group have been identified from their inscriptions on vases—some of them

inscriptions about one another, accompanied by pictures of them partying together, wine cups in hand

By around 520 B.C., the fiercely competitive Euphronios was beginning his career, perfecting histechnique and drawing inspiration from the Homeric account of Sarpedon’s death Euphronios mayhave still been in his late teens when he painted the first of his two known works portraying

Sarpedon For this first try, he started small, with a dainty kylix wine chalice

In this ancient art, the clay was the thing, providing everything a painter and potter needed—including the substances that could create all the colors on a vase Attic clay—the clay of Athens—contains iron, which gives it a reddish brown color when fired in a kiln The clay used to make

Athenian pots was essentially rusty And a kylix, the most delicate vase in the Athenian repertoire,required the finest grade of this clay On a day somewhere around 520 B.C., Euphronios set aboutmaking such a chalice

Once the clay was selected, a colleague of Euphronios’s, who would actually make the

underlying cup, placed the moist lump on his potter’s wheel, a disk probably made of stone, wood, orterra-cotta Unlike pottery wheels commonly known today that allow the potter to move the wheel bykicking an attachment underneath the shaft, these had to be turned by hand A boy, probably an

apprentice, sat on the ground and spun the wheel with his hands As the wheel picked up speed withthe hunk of clay at its center, the potter pressed his thumbs into the mass to create the beginnings of avessel that rose upward as the force of the spinning pushed outward into the potter’s hand After

forming the wide-rimmed cup, they used a glue of wet clay to add a short stem and base, along withtwo handles that flared from opposite sides of the cup like wings And then the kylix was stored in adamp room, to harden but not completely dry

Next came the decoration von Bothmer gushed about Euphronios and his cohort could “paint”their vases without using a single drop of pigment

The magic began when Euphronios mixed the glazes that would become the black portions of thecup’s decoration He started with the already purified clay that his workshop used for potting its

vases, and then he purified it once more in a glass container, using a process of sedimentation.

Impurities such as sand sank to the bottom At the top floated a layer of the finest particles of clay,suspended in water That would become the glaze

But first, Euphronios drew the design’s outline, possibly with a charcoal pencil, on the hard but still slightly moist clay cup The process was akin to painting a fresco on wet plaster, so hehad to work fast The clock was ticking as the surface of the kylix began to dry The painter sat in achair with the blank cup on his lap, the base at his knees On the inside of the cup, known as the tondo,

leather-he sketcleather-hed out a simple floral design of eight palm brancleather-hes, known as palmettes During a drinkingparty, this inside part of the kylix would be obscured by wine, so there was no need for Euphronios towaste a dramatic tableau there

The outside surface of the cup, however, would be seen by all, whether during the

heavy-drinking events known as “symposia,” or on display in the home of a faraway foreign collector or inthe burial chamber of a rich man’s tomb The two handles poking out of either side of the cup neatlydivided Euphronios’s canvas into two sides One side would be the front, to which he would dedicatehis greatest effort The other would be the back, still painted with care, but in a rush to beat the clock

as both the pot and the paint dried

As he sketched, the outlines of a melancholy scene from the Trojan War emerged It was alreadysome seven hundred years after the fabled battles, and Euphronios began to draw what is today thefirst known depiction of the death of Sarpedon He depicted the warrior prince naked, with a wound

to his chest, a full beard, rippling abdominal muscles, and thick eyelashes The artist drew the deityDeath dressed in the disguise of a soldier and carrying a shield, grabbing Sarpedon’s arm and

heaving him over his shoulder Sleep, dressed the same, grabbed Sarpedon’s legs

Turning his attention to the back of the cup—and keeping track of the time—Euphronios sketchedout the less dramatic scene of a pyrrhic dance, a ritual performed in armor In a final touch to hisoutline, the artist filled in the spaces near the handles with designs of flowers and palm fronds, andthen he started to paint

Euphronios’s glazes were mostly made of clay, but each of the several mixtures would yield aunique result The thicker glazes would produce the darkest black colors, which were used to outlinethe figures of deities and warriors, and the thinner ones would produce the translucent browns used torepresent hair and other delicate details He had paintbrushes for the thin glazes, but for the viscousones he probably had a contraption similar to a pastry chef’s icing bag, which he could squeeze as if

he were decorating a birthday cake For color highlights, he also had at his disposal red ocher todepict blood

As he painted, Euphronios really was working blind, for the different gray glazes would onlyturn the correct colors in the kiln He had to imagine what it would all look like

When he finished coloring in the cup, Euphronios added a personal touch that was, at the time,revolutionary He signed the vase The painter asserted his authorship of the kylix by doing somethingthat’s commonplace in the millennia that have since come and gone On the foot of the cup, along theoutside rim, he wrote in Greek, “Euphronios Egraphsen.” Put bluntly, he said, “Euphronios PaintedThis.” Beautiful artifacts had been made by talented artisans for thousands of years, but only until thetime of Euphronios and a few of his Athenian predecessors had such works been thought of as art towhich their creators should attach their names The entire Western concept of the artist was just

beginning to come to life

To finish off the chalice, and bring the colors into existence, Euphronios just needed to managethe alchemy of the kiln and its own intricate chemistry

Inside the hot oven, which had ample air to feed the fire, the clay oxidized, or rusted, turning thewhole cup red Then the kiln’s operator plugged up the furnace’s air supply The fire needed oxygen,which it sucked away from the surface of the chalice, causing the whole pot to turn black The fireburned so hot that it melted the glazes into hard, glassy shells When the craftsmen pulled out the plug,letting air rush back in, the oxygen tried to combine again with the surface of the cup However, itcould only do so on the parts that hadn’t become hardened The glazed parts retained their black

color, while the unglazed portions turned red again For the first time, the picture of Sarpedon cameinto view

A week later, after being allowed to cool, the cup was finished But this Sarpedon chalice wasjust the start of Euphronios’s tribute to the fallen Lycian prince

A few years later the Athenian painter would reach the peak of his artistry by creating the

chalice’s bigger twin, revisiting the death of Sarpedon with a grand krater for mixing wine and water.Around 515 B.C., a colleague of Euphronios’s named Euxitheos potted the hefty wine vat in sectionsand stuck them together with clay slip This type of krater later became known as a calyx krater

because the outward sweep of its rim made it resemble a calyx, the inside of a flower Then

Euphronios did his best to re-create the drama of his Sarpedon kylix on this grander canvas The

result is almost unanimously considered the most perfect Greek vase, in both its proportion and

painting

This was the pot Hoving would see once he awoke from his nap above the Atlantic

Before they landed that morning, on June 27, 1972, Hoving had one last question about the vase that

awaited them

“Dietrich, what’s your guess on the origin of this astonishing krater? Can’t be very likely it’sbeen sitting around on some English Lordy’s mantelpiece after great-grandfather got it on the GrandTour in the eighteenth century, is it?”

Von Bothmer fell silent, and Hoving decided that this would be the last time they would speakabout where the krater had really come from

Hoving and von Bothmer took a taxi to Bürki’s suburban Zurich house Hoving’s second in

command at the Met, Theodore Rousseau Jr., had traveled separately and arrived soon afterward.Hecht and Bürki had been waiting for the men from the Met and escorted them inside the home, whichdoubled as Bürki’s workshop In the dining room, Hoving saw the krater sitting on a table, but heaverted his eyes He wanted his first impression to be in broad daylight “Take it outside,” he said,walking out into Bürki’s garden He grabbed a cold beer and, when the vase was in place, turnedaround to soak in the sight As he circled the krater, Hoving gazed at Sarpedon’s nude body, spoutingblood, his teeth clenched in a final agony “No figure of Christ on the cross I’d ever seen matched thisimage,” Hoving, a medieval art historian by training, later recalled in his memoirs He vowed tohimself that he would get this vase “This was the single most perfect work of art I had ever

encountered.”

Hoving sat down and blurted, “Sublime!” He wasn’t able to play the role of cool haggler

Hoving took Hecht aside and admitted to him that this was the most beautiful work of art he’d beenoffered since he’d become director of the museum

Von Bothmer circled the krater, describing it aloud and picking out details He pointed out an

inscription, Leagros Kalos—“Leagros is beautiful”—the same inscription on the krater in Berlin that

launched von Bothmer’s career during a boyhood museum visit The Leagros inscription dated the

vase to between 520 and 510 B.C., von Bothmer said.

Then the negotiations began They broke for lunch, with Hecht taking them to Rotisserie de laMuette where they ate grilled beefsteak, Hecht later recalled (Hoving remembered the lunch in hismemoirs as being at a Mövenpick fast-food restaurant.) The American dealer said the Met could havethe krater for $1.3 million Hoving countered that if Hecht would take just $850,000, he could have aregistered check to him in a week Otherwise, the museum was too strapped for cash to come up withany more

Then Hecht made a suggestion that set in motion a series of events that would make a deal

possible Hecht said he’d give Hoving the krater, plus $350,000, in exchange for two collections ofancient coins that he’d heard the Met was thinking of selling anyway What Hoving didn’t know wasthat three weeks earlier von Bothmer had told Hecht that the Met was on the verge of putting its

Durkee and Ward collections of Greek and Roman coins up for sale through a Zurich firm And, inturn, what Hecht didn’t know is that the offer he’d just made—of the krater plus cash for the whole lot

of coins—valued the coins at much more than the price Hoving was about to accept for the coins.Hoving, realizing he could get more for the coins, would cancel the cheaper Zurich sale and getSotheby’s in London to guarantee the higher price he could now get In the meantime, Hoving knew hehad to raise the touchy issue of the krater’s provenance, no matter how uncomfortable it had made vonBothmer earlier that morning

“My Finnish grandfather has owned this vase for seventy-five years,” Hecht said and then

laughed “Really The owner has had it—in pieces—since before the First World War, I supposearound 1914.”

Hoving asked for a name

“Dikran Sarrafian Dikran is an antiquities dealer in Beirut.”

Hoving said he doubted this story, and Hecht continued with a tale of how Sarrafian had kept thevase fragments in a shoe box, but because Beirut was getting dangerous, had decided to consign thedisassembled pot to Hecht Hoving didn’t buy this, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t buy the krater.Hoving told Hecht he could have $1 million for the Euphronios krater—$850,000 in cash and the rest

in sculptures from the Met’s storeroom, to be selected by von Bothmer

Hecht said he didn’t think Sarrafian would take less than $1.3 million, but he would check Theprice was surely negotiable, Hecht said, especially if the Met could come up with the cash quickly.Time was money; the U.S dollar was weakening against the Swiss franc, the currency in which he’dpromised to pay Medici

And then Hoving added another condition: to do a deal he needed paperwork showing the

legitimate origins of the vase Hecht assured him he’d have all the documents he’d need With that, themen went their separate ways

Hoving correctly anticipated he would have no problems coming up with the cash to buy thekrater; the Met would eventually collect almost $2.3 million from selling the coins through Sotheby’s.From the outset of his negotiations with Hecht, the museum’s director knew that he would have plenty

of room to play hard to get He was right Hecht made the next move, writing Hoving a letter:

If you appreciated the garden piece as much as you seemed to, there is no reason why

we should not come to terms somewhere in between your price and my 1.3

Hoving, still playing it cool and realizing that Hecht was coming down to his million-dollaroffer, didn’t reply Through most of July 1972, he let Hecht sweat it out while also putting von

Bothmer through the charade of selecting statues from the collection to trade to Hecht The two

negotiators spoke indirectly through von Bothmer When Hoving was on his summer vacation on

Martha’s Vineyard, von Bothmer called him with the news that Hecht was making a final offer of $1.1million and would walk away if the Met didn’t pay it

Hoving called Hecht in Rome He spoke in code, knowing that Hecht feared the Italian art policewere bugging his phone “For appearances’ sake don’t want to walk all the kilometers you mention.Can only go one kilometer,” Hoving said

On the other end of the line, Hecht breathed heavily, without uttering a word And then he brokethe silence

“Agreed,” Hecht said

“I’ll talk to your wife on details,” Hoving said, and then hung up Sitting in his office, shufflingthrough the photos of the krater, Hoving later recalled that he “felt a near-sexual pleasure.” Hechtreveled in his own version of rapture at getting the sale done It was already nighttime in Rome, and

he celebrated with a plate of spaghetti with clams and some grilled scampi He washed it down with

a now-rare white Chianti, a more common Tuscan wine at the time, before vineyards feeding the

American market largely switched their production to reds

Von Bothmer, who had feared this krater would be the one that got away, was also thrilled Still,the deal wasn’t exactly finished They still needed the approval of the acquisitions committee

Hecht flew the next day from Rome to Zurich to see the vase, which Bürki was rushing to

restore Looking to speed along the approval of the acquisitions committee, Hecht prepared to shipthe krater to New York the following Thursday He bought two first-class tickets—one for him, andone for the pot—on TWA flight 831 from Zurich to JFK, at a cost of about $450 each Bürki almostdidn’t complete his work in time for the flight, filling in the slivers of red plastic with black paint andputting on other finishing touches into late Wednesday evening

The men packed the krater in a wooden case and took it the next day to the Zurich’s Kloten

Airport, where TWA personnel gave the pot the first-class treatment Hecht had paid for, handling allthe security issues in the crowded terminal Just half an hour before the departure time, Hecht boardedthe jet with the krater and strapped the box into the oversized chair next to him using an ordinary seatbelt

Sarpedon, resuming his voyage after a twenty-four-hundred-year break, got the window seat.Upon their arrival in New York on August 31, 1972, the museum’s shipping agent, accompanied

by an armed guard who wore a revolver in a holster, met Hecht and the krater The shipping agent hadprepared the paperwork for U.S Customs, but an officer still had to take a look When they openedthe box, the inspector told Hecht and the man from the Met that they sure had a real beauty Satisfiedwith the paperwork, on which Hecht declared the krater’s value at $1 million, Customs waved themthrough Even Hecht was amazed at how quickly the Met’s import system was working By his timing,

it took just forty-five minutes to get the krater from the jet to the car outside The museum’s shippingagent loaded the box into his station wagon and drove the dealer and his precious cargo into

Manhattan and the Fifth Avenue temple to the arts

As they arrived at the loading bay at the south end of the museum, Hecht’s wife and two of hisdaughters, wearing jeans and T-shirts, ran over to greet him They opened the box in a museum

storeroom and took out the vase, tossing away the packing materials “I’m going to cry,” Hecht’s wifesaid “It’s like a Rembrandt.” Hecht handed Hoving a bill that affirmed the vase had come from